GSF User's Guide

An Important Note on Backwards-Compatibility

One of the major changes introduced into the GSF codebase in version 12 (and up) is a brand new namespace for all classes and loggers. In doing so, all of the GSF's pre-existing classes have been deprecated in this release.

The new namespace is: tools.gsf. Starting this initial release of GSF, new "CORE" classes belong to a subpackage of "tools.gsf" (or "tools.gsf" itself). All deprecated classes are packaged inside a separate artifact / JAR file called "LEGACY".

The above implies all pre-existing classes - i.e. all classes under the legacy namespace - com.fatwire.gst - will enter the GSF deprecation cycle.

The GSF's deprecation cycle dictates that deprecated components will be physically removed from the GSF's codebase / project in the next major release after deprecation occurs.

If you are extending the GSF (or looking at the the source code anyway), you will notice that there are classes in the CORE artifact which are exactly the same as one in the LEGACY artifact.

This is our way of allowing your smoothly transitioning from the old namespace / classes onto the new ones.

However, note that deprecated classes will not be enhanced, ever. Only the CORE classes will. In other words, as CORE features / classes evolve they will gradually diverge from their LEGACY counterpart, whenever applicable.

For all of the above, you are strongly advised to move away from the legacy module, and utilize gsf-core exclusively.