1 Copyright (C) 1996-2004, International Business Machines Corporation and 2 others. All Rights Reserved. 3 4 ------------------------------------------- 5 Using the GatherAPIData and ReportAPI tools 6 ------------------------------------------- 7 8 These two tools are used together to generate reports about changes in 9 supported API between versions of ICU4J. 10 11 12 GatherAPIData 13 14 GatherAPIData uses javadoc to process the ICU4J source files and 15 generate a file listing information about the public API, including 16 the ICU4J status (draft, stable, deprecated, obsolete). It excludes 17 private API, API marked @internal. The file is written as text, so it 18 is human-readable, but it is a bit verbose. To save space, the file 19 can be zip'd or gzip'd (using flags passed to the tool), which will 20 reduce the size by about a factor of 10. 21 22 GatherAPIData requires javadoc and is currently based on sun jdk 23 1.4.2. JavaDoc is internal (I believe) so you need a reference jvm 24 from Sun to compile the tool, but it can be run against any 1.4 JDK 25 (at least, those from Sun). Instructions in the source file show how 26 it can be invoked. 27 28 GatherAPIData should be passed all the packages that need reporting. 29 Currently, public api is only in the lang, math, text, and util 30 subpackages of com.ibm.icu. 31 32 33 ReportAPI 34 35 ReportAPI takes two api files generated by GatherAPIData and reports 36 on removals, changes, and additions to the API. It does this by 37 comparing the API information in the two API files. When new classes 38 are added, only the class is listed, not its entire API, and similarly 39 when a class is deleted. When APIs with the same name and signature 40 are changed (visibility, status, inheritance) these changes are listed 41 by showing the old and new versions of the API. 42 43 ReportAPI is not particularly smart, and in particular, does not know 44 about inherited API. So for example, moving public API from a class 45 to a base class is reported as a deletion of API from the original 46 class, even though the effective API on the original class is 47 unchanged by this. 48 49 ReportAPI also does not know about Java class files, so for example it 50 cannot be used to compare com.ibm.icu.lang.UCharacter against 51 java.lang.Character. This might be provided in a later release. 52 53 For these reasons, in general it is best to compare two successive 54 versions of ICU4J against each other, rather than radically different 55 versions. A large number of changes can show up, many of which might 56 fall into these 'innocuous' categories. 57 58 ReportAPI can generate either plain text or html reports. Since it 59 only requires the data files and does not rely on JavaDoc, it is more 60 straightforward to invoke. 61 62 ReportAPI uses the file extension to determine how to uncompress the 63 api data files. It expects '.zip' for files that have been compressed 64 using zip, and '.gz' for files that have been compressed using gzip. 65 The GatherAPIData utility automatically appends these extensions when 66 compression is used. 67 68 API Data Files 69 70 API Data files for ICU4J 2.8 and 3.0 are in this directory. The 71 intent is to store data files for each release version of ICU4J, to 72 facilitate comparison using the ReportAPI tool. Of course, they can 73 always be regenerated using the GenerateAPI and the sources of a 74 particular ICU4J release. 75 76 The format of the API data file is straightforward. The first line of 77 the file is the header, successive lines are the api information. 78 Each line consists of a number of tokens, each followed by a 79 semi-colon (incuding the last token on the line). 80 81 The header line contains the version number, the 'name' of the version 82 of ICU4J represented by the file, and a 'base directory' field 83 (currently not fully implemented). 84 85 The following lines contain data generated by the APIInfo class, one 86 line per class or method. The tokens are status, visibility, static, 87 final, synchronized, abstract, type, package, containing class, name, 88 and 'signature' (which varies by the type of object). For classes, 89 the 'signature' is the immediate inheritance of the class. For 90 fields, the 'signature' is the type of the field. For methods, the 91 'signature' is the function signature. All fields are always present. 92 93 For more information, please see APIInfo.java. 94 95 ------- 96
