NetBeans 6.1 Backward Compatibility Testing Report

This document contains results of backward compatibility testing that was done by several NetBeans community partners. The intention was to verify that no incompatible API changes were introduced in NetBeans 6.1 Platform.

Instant JChem by ChemAxon

Petr Zajac from ChemAxon development team did the actual testing on March 20th, 2008. He compiled their Instant JChem product (based on the release60 branch) against NetBeans 6.1 Platform (build #20080320110703) downloaded from http://deadlock.netbeans.org and compilation succeeded. He then ran the Instant JChem application and discovered no problems. In the attached ide.log there are two exceptions (missing JDBC driver, missing libX11.so library) but both problems do not represent incompatibility issues. In addition to that Petr executed ~200 automated unit tests in this setup and all tests passed and this way indirectly tested 150 NetBeans Platform modules.

On the other hand ChemAxon would appreciate if NetBeans Platform could upgrade itself. In this regard, Petr already submitted patch #128079 which was closed as duplicate of more generic solution.

Evaluation of report

1. no compatibility issues
   1. missing JDBC driver, missing libX11.so library - just warnings about missing javadb driver and about missing JNA library for transparency

Log Management, Perspectives by Anuradha Gunasekara

Anuradha Gunasekara, author of Log Management and Perspectives plugins for NetBeans 6.0 helped with backward compatibility testing on March 20th, 2008. Both plugins are compilable in latest trunk sources without problems. Besides, Anuradha belongs to a development team currently working on an ERP system (32 modules) built on top of 40 NetBeans Platform modules and this project also works fine with the latest NetBeans 6.1 sources.

Evaluation of report

1. no compatibility issues

Citra FX, Sketsa by KIYUT

Tonny Kohar from KIYUT company agreed on testing the backward compatibility on March 24th, 2008 using their Citra FX digital photo effects editor and Sketsa vector drawing application that are both based on 34 NetBeans Platform modules (build #200803240003). According to their tests there are no compatibility issues, everything builds and runs as expected. The attached Citra FX and Sketsa log files show no error only several warnings related to menu ordering. One was already reported as issue #121641 and the other two are being investigated. Both logs also show the missing libX11.so library problem again.

Evaluation of report

1. no compatibility issues
   1. missing libX11.so library - just warnings about missing JNA library for transparency
   2. menu ordering warnings - needs to be fixed on module side

iReport by JasperSoft

Giulio Toffoli tested backward compatibility of JasperSoft's iReport plugin for NetBeans 6.0 on March 20th, 2008. They are very happy that we asked for feedback on this topic because they already had to workaround two API changes introduced in NetBeans Platform 6.1. To date their QE department performed functional testing with NetBeans 6.1 M1 (Windows and Mac OS X) and NetBeans 6.1 Build #200802270005 (Windows). We were given access to their iReport sources in public SVN repository in case we want to do the testing ourselves (ask Jiri Kovalsky for username/password). Description of the two API changes follows.

1. XML dataobject changed (reported as #128651) which caused that iReport documents (*.jrxml files) are no longer associated with iReport Designer but only plain XML Editor instead. Implemented solution: new XML dataobject class added to plugin manifest.

Install-Before: org.openide.loaders.XMLDataObject,
org.netbeans.modules.xml.core.XMLDataObject,
org.netbeans.modules.xml.XMLDataObject

2. Changed return value of targetFolder.getPrimaryFile().getPath(); which no longer returns c:\ or / in 6.1 Implemented solution: problem is workarounded by additional code:

FileObject file = targetFolder.getPrimaryFile();
File f = FileUtil.toFile (file);
String path = f.getPath();

Evaluation of report

1. incompatibilities found
   1. Changed return value of getPath() - based on community feedback the change was reverted to the original behaviour -> FO returns c:\ or / again
   2. XML dataobject changed it implementation class - true incompatibility, not fixed, it was decided to fix the client code, fix simple: one line change in module manifest

Attachments

anuradha_nb_modules.txt		1960 bytes
chemaxon_nb_modules.txt		8351 bytes
citra-fx-log.txt		31800 bytes
ide.log		32841 bytes
sketsa-log.txt		25888 bytes