What do you mean that the SDK is not installed by default? If you download ‘Eclipse Classic’ it is. All of the projects part of the Eclipse Classic (SDK) distribution are using API Tools.

In response to your questions:

1) internal.provisional basically means that the classes in these packages are still internal but most likely will end up as API in a future release. It’s a way of committers getting more feedback before things are made into a permanent API.

2) Yap, that’s one of the reasons. Also, if you mark something final, you don’t leave consumers ANY room to do something. Consumers can still break the rules if they want to, but they are at least warned.

One remark is that if I’m not wrong Eclipse SDK is required to use API Tools. You should mention it in the article as the SDK is not installed by default in 3.4

2 stupid questions though:

1- What exactly means “internal.provisional” packages ?
2- What’s the point of using @noextend annotation for a class instead of declaring it “final” ? To give the API developer some room to still extend it in the future, but not the consumer ?

API Tooling