Friday, August 7, 2020

Project Amber Design Documents on GitHub

As discussed in a Brian Goetz post on the amber-spec-experts mailing list, an effort is currently underway for "migrating design docs to GitHub." The GitHub repository is openjdk/amber-docs and it already hosts some frequently-referenced Project Amber design documents.

The project's main README states that this repository "is for design notes, presentations, guides, FAQs, and other collateral surrounding OpenJDK Project Amber." It also explains the relationship between the Amber design documents in this repository with those hosted on the OpenJDK Project Amber site: "Most documents here are written in (pandoc) Markdown, and changes made to Markdown sources are automatically formatted and pushed to the OpenJDK website.

The Amber design documents hosted on openjdk/amber-docs are currently categorized as either design-notes or guides. Here are some of the Amber design documents already hosted in the new openjdk/amber-docs GitHub repository (mostly in GitHub-friendly MarkDown format):

The moving of OpenJDK source and artifacts to GitHub via Project Skara is paying benefits already in terms of accessibility for Java developers. The moving of Amber design documents to GitHub will likewise make these documents more readily available. As a side note, the OpenJDK design discussions and decisions are also often readily available from the relatively new Inside.java blog that features "news and views from the Java team at Oracle."

Although these Project Amber design documents have long been publicly available, this migration to GitHub should make them even easier to access and will likely increase awareness of and access to these documents. Undoubtedly, advantages inherent with a modern version control system will be gained including easier ability to make, review, track, audit, and contribute changes.

1 comment:

@DustinMarx said...

The Brian Goetz post "A peek at the roadmap for pattern matching and more
" on the amber-spec-experts mailing list announces "two drafts which are VERY ROUGH, but which correspond to the next two logical increments after patterns in switch" and both are available in openjdk/amber-docs GitHub project's eg-drafts area: "Deconstruction patterns for records and classes" and "Functional transformation of immutable objects".