[DEV] Extras v1.1 - Additional useful and advanced methods for plugin developers [1.0.1-R1]

This looks great

But your missing the version number and craftbukkit build number in you thread title.

"Extras" should not have an apostrophe unless you're saying that "extra is" or talking about something that "extra" owns. Also, the first sentence says "opensource" twice, which, by the way, should be "open source." Another apostrophe mishap on "javadocs." Anyway, this is interesting-- keep it up.

Heyy, It was 5am my time when I posted this, cut me some slack Thanks though.

See above .

Adding a scheduler library. Hope to finish it today

Amazing. Good job.

Brilliant. I will most definitely use this for its regions, and once you're completed with the Scheduler, I'll take a look into that as well.

Finished Cryptography Library & Added Scheduler Library.
Working on a basic video tutorial and some example plugins now.

Added updateInventory() method - Not sure if it works though .

Added :

public abstract Block getLookedAtBlock(Player p);

public abstract Location getLocationLooked(Player p);

Fixed Cryptography Methods

That apostrophe is really bugging me.

Oh, and you should make a Maven repository because you can't just throw a file into Eclipse with Maven, you actually need to have a repository and you need to point Maven to the repo. You should be using Maven.

Me too, hahah.

I made this post originally at 5am
As for Maven I'm not too sure what you're suggesting but I have no experience with it.

As for that apostrophe...look again

Broken download link?

Sorry, fixed now, just re-download.

Do you have a function like
GetWeather(World)
Returns a string with storm, sun and thunder?
and
IsBlockAboveHead(Player)
Returns true when there is a block above Player's head.
and false when not.

Maven? Is that required? I don't have it installed.

Nope, just import it and it's ready to use.

I like the block above head idea, I'll add that in, as for the getweather don't you mean a string either storm sun or thunder?

Over that getweather yes, that i mean, and A block above his head thanks
Idea:
IsBlockAboveHead(Player p, Blocks b)
Blocks = How much blocks they check? if 0 all blocks above his head.

Added Javadocs http://adamki11s.zxq.net/doc/index.html

Styx Reborn approves. (atleast the dev)

Did you see my comments on github?

When we hook into this plugin, does the downloader have to install this first?

You're meant to download this and include it as a library in your project.

Ohhh.. thanks.

Can you add a smoke method?

Soon, when I release my Warzone plugin

Fixed a small issue with scheduler tasks.

Frankly, this looks like 75% unnecessary fluff and 25% actually useful stuff. (Percentages not ratified.)

I don't even know what the colour methods do differently than the built-in sendMessage (because I'm going exclusively from your JavaDocs; don't make people look at the source to figure out what a method does, okay?).

The cryptography functions I can see as being useful, but surely these things already exist somewhere in java.* or javax.*? If so, including them here is totally pointless. Even if not, I can't think of many uses for them in Bukkit. Still, they're definitely not useless.

The move event methods certainly look useful.

I can kinda see the point of the inventory methods, though most of them are not that useful since they look like they'd be a thin wrapper around the Bukkit methods to allow you to manipulate the inventory without constructing an ItemStack.

The player methods look mostly useful; forceChat however seems entirely useless since it looks like it does the exact same thing as player.chat(), and mountPlayer is entirely useless since you could achieve the exact same effect using mountEntity. That said, I don't see the point of having mountEntity when you can just use... what was it, entity.setPassenger() or something like that?

Half of your random methods are useless. Why include getRandomInt/Float/Double when they already exist in the Random class? The other three look useful though. What about getRandomBlock() that returns a Material instead of an int?

Region methods look useful.

What's the point of the scheduler? Bukkit already has a built-in scheduler; what makes yours any different/better than the built-in one?

I guess the terrain methods are useful, though I'd change the ArrayList ones to just List.

I don't even know what the trace methods do, since your documentation seems to be written with the assumption that I already know what it does.

From what I can tell from the documentation class, the Extras class is totally useless at its intended task; you should a) make the pluginName a non-static member of Extras, b) make all of the ExtrasXYZ classes take an Extras as a parameter, and possibly c) make the Extras constructor take Plugin as an argument instead of String. Why is it useless? Because if multiple plugins use your libraries, the use of the plugin name for reporting errors will get messed up and report the wrong plugin in many situations.

In summary, this (a utility library for Bukkit) is a good idea, but I think you should try to improve your documentation and maybe reconsider the usefulness of some of these things. I could go on to suggest other things that I think would be useful to add, but this post is long enough for now. Maybe later.

Of course the cryptography methods exist in Java however I am providing an easy interface to do a somewhat advanced process and with plugin such as AuthMe and other password protections security is important. I wouldn't like my password stored as plaintext.

The inventory methods are a thin wrapper, yes but they make everything that little bit easier for new plugin devs who are inexperienced with ItemStacks and the like which is mainly what this plugin attempts to appeal to.

I am not going to deny that my Scheduler is simply a wrapper for Bukkit's one however, as mentioned before this library is aimed mainly at aspiring/new developers who would get confused with variable scope within the run() method and also how the whole thing is constructed. My method makes an easy and straightforward (For new developers) implementation.

The documentation on Trace is a bit vague I admit but overall it's just a way for people to 'trace' how long it takes for a certain piece of code to run.