API status

Revision as of 16:08, 30 July 2013 by Viktor.Pracht (talk | contribs)
Feature stability levels

Open-Xchange products are continuously improved. Most of the time, these improvements result in changes, which have no side-effects on existing installations and integrations with 3rd party software. Unfortunatly, sometimes, fixing a bug or adding a new feature requires changing existing features in a way that breaks backward compatibility.

To help you stay informed about such changes, and to help you decide, when to deploy them, we mark documentation pages with a stability level. This page defines what each stability level means and where you should look for information about current and upcoming changes to the documented feature.

In creating these levels we were inspired by the node.js stability index.


In development

This feature is currently being developed and may change or be removed in future versions. Please try it out and provide feedback. Due to the low overhead of making changes at this stage, your feedback is more likely to be integrated into the feature, than in the other stability levels.

Changes will not be announced. Using the watch function to stay updated may help. We will try to update the documentation concurrently with code changes, but cannot guarantee it.

New

This feature came out just recently and is in the process of settling. Since changes are more likely due to feedback from first real-world experiences, this is a separate level from Stable.

Changes will not be announced. We recommend using the watch function for the given page to stay updated.

Stable

The feature has proven satisfactory, but cleanup in the underlying code may cause minor changes. Backwards-compatibility will be maintained if reasonable.

Incompatible changes will be announced in the release notes.

Frozen

This API has been tested extensively in production and is unlikely to ever have to change. If they do occur anyway, changes will be announced in the release notes two major releases in advance.

Deprecated

This feature is known to be problematic, and changes or even removal are planned. Do not rely on it. Use of the feature may cause warnings. Backwards compatibility should not be expected.

Changes will not be announced.