Re: PKCS7 support in JDK

David Brownell (db@Eng)
Mon, 21 Sep 1998 15:00:28 -0700

> > I would like to extend the PKCS7 class to add this functionality myself. But
> > it is not straight-forward to extend this class. All the parsing of the
> > signed data is implemented as private to the class. To be able to provide
> > a new class which can parse signed/enveloped/encrypted data I will need
> > to duplicate code from the PKCS7 class.
> >
> > Why was this class designed like this ??
>
> That's a very legitimate question. (I was wondering that myself. :-) )

I think it's fair to say that it was not designed to be a
public API, but to be quickly implemented. Designing an
API for re-use is a lot of work, and requirs understanding
the scope of at least three applications which need such
features. Those didn't exist in that particular case. (In
many other cases they did, though.)

- Dave