| [cross-project-issues-dev] Pre-Announcement: Major version change and API breakage in Zest for 2024-12 |
Hello everyone,
over the past few months, we've been busy integrating the Zest
2.0 project back into GEF-Classic. As a result, the bundle version
will be increased from 1.6.0 (as of now) to 2.0.0 and also define
a new way custom layouts have to be implemented. Zest Core will
remain at version 1.x. However, several classes/methods have been
marked as deprecated due to the changes in Zest Layouts. With a
future release, we also plan to update Zest Core to 2.0.0, mainly
to split it up into two separate bundles, removing the dependency
to the Eclipse platform. But this isn't something that won't
happen before 2025-03.
If you are using the default layouts (e.g. Grid-/SpringLayoutAlgorithm), then the required code changes should keep themselves to a minimum. To simplify migrating your own layouts, we will also introduce a "legacy" mode, in which you can use your own Zest 1.x layouts with the Zest 2.x engine. Meaning that for the initial transition, you can re-use your existing code and make sure that your product is still running correctly, before you adapt to the new API.
Given that everyone is already quite ahead in their release
cycles, we plan on merging everything back into the main branch is
not the current release (2024-09), but rather the next
release (2024-12). So there will be a separate email once the
changes went live. Once we are closer to the final release, we
also plan on drafting a quick guide containing a rough overview on
what has changed between the versions and how to migrate from one
version to the next.
You can find the current state of Zest 2.0 here [1], if you want
to give it a try already. Just note that while close to being
finished, there are still some minor things that will be cleaned
within the next months. The umbrella issue can be found here [2].
If you have any concerns or rely on now-deprecated functionality,
feel free to reach out to us.
Finally, I also want to thank Fabian Steeg, for preserving and
maintaining the final version of the SWT-based Zest implementation
and making it available to us!
Many Regards,
Patrick
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[1] https://github.com/eclipse/gef-classic/issues/416
[2] https://github.com/eclipse/gef-classic/pull/476