[MOBY-dev] API Change/Recommendation/Best-Practice/Meme Proposal

[Paul Gordon]

Hi everyone,

    At long last after our discussions at the last MOBY meeting in 
Vancouver, I have written a little document explaining the reason for 
and consequences of not inheriting from "primitive" objects such as 
String and Integer.  I think that this is a distruptive change for only 
a few services, but is of great benefit.  Please see

http://coe02.ucalgary.ca/gordonp/moby_primitives.html

Mark has suggested that this not be a formal change to the API, but that 
this new way of doing things be encouraged in all of the documentation, 
and the old method explicitly deprecated but not disabled.  Hopefully 
most of you agree, and we can just make temporary exceptions in our code 
for the current non-compliant classes.  Or even better, if most people 
agree, we can force the affected services to change over. :-)

P.S.  Yan, your object browser came in quite handy while I was writing 
this, nice work!  One suggestion though, arranging the objects 
alphabetically in the tree (when within the same branch and level) would 
help ease navigation.

P.P.S. Our Web server will be down briefly this afternoon, so you may 
get a timeout/cannot connect on the link.