While trying to update my qooxdoo wrapper to 1.3. I had the problem that I could find out easily which classes, methods and properties have been added/remove between e.g. 1.2 and 1.3 so that I could adjust my GWT-Wrappers.

This was until Andreas Ecker from the qooxdoo team pointed me to an interesting Meta-Data information the generator spits out for the API-Viewer. It took me about an hour to write a small Java-Programm which created a diff of those .json-Files.

Below you see an example output of a diff between Qooxdoo 1.2 and 1.3.

You can download the small utility from here. The usage is quite simply as long as you have Java installed on your system.

Usage: java -jar qxapidiff.jar -v0 $APIVIEWER_DIR_VERSION_0 -v1 $APIVIEWER_DIR_VERSION_1 [-a 0|1|2]
Arguments:
	* -v0 (mandatory) ... Path to old versions API-Viewers script directory e.g. /home/tom/qx-1.0-sdk/framework/api/script
	* -v1 (mandatory) ... Path to new versions API-Viewers script directory e.g. /home/tom/qx-1.3-sdk/framework/api/script
	* -a ................ Minum-Access-Level for Method diff: 0 = private, 1 = protected, 2 = public
	* -h ................ Prints this message

if you think you can improve it, you are free to do so (e.g. to add constructors and method-arguments to the diff calculation) because you can access the sources from my public SVN-Repository.

I think in future I can use this informations to e.g. write create wrappers or at least their stubs automagically 🙂 but until then I need to wrap them by hand.