Re: [mpc-dev] Small changes to the Eclipse Marketplace REST API

[Carsten Reckord <reckord@xxxxxxxx>]

Ian,

Some answers below:

On 27.02.2013 06:31, Ian Bull wrote:
> I assume there are corresponding changes going into the MPC Client.  So I
> have two questions:
> 
> 1. What will happen with old MPC clients (Juno and earlier) when they try
> to connect to the new Market Place API.

There's two cases to account for here:

1. new properties - those will just be ignored by old clients. The MPC
parsers handle all known properties explicitly and just skip everything they
don't know. There is no generic unmarshalling going on.

2. changed "favorited" property - as I just commented on the bug, this
wouldn't change API signature, so old clients would parse it just fine. Also
the property value is currently not used in the client.

> 2. What will happen with new MPC clients (Kepler and later) when they try
> to connect to market place servers that don't provide this API (other
> market places)?

This concerns the two new attributes mostly. I'd handle this by using an
Integer instead of an int and properly dealing with null values indicating
that the marketplace doesn't support that attribute. This could be showing
the numbers as unknown in the MPC or just leaving the install counts out
completely.