[Ktechlab-devel] Yet another draft of the interface code

[Julian Bäume]

On Thursday 07 January 2010 22:12:40 Alan Grimes wrote:
> =(
> I spend 4 years tweaking this code.
> 
> And just as it's just starting to get under control...
> 
> You go off half-cocked and start designing these silly little interfaces...
Nobody wants to make your work obsolete, here! I haven't touched any of the 
parts, you are working on, yet. The last days, I have been merging all your 
changes from svn into git to work on the integration of the simulator. I have 
to little knowledge about how the simulator works, to touch it. I won't change 
anything in there, without talking about it on the list and get your ACK on 
it.
 
> The interface is the header file.
That's only part of it. For a good plugin-system to work, we need to agree on 
these header files. There need to be some header files (interfaces) that are in 
a shape, where they can be exported to the public. (This is the API). This API 
should be as clean as possible and as direct as possible. This is hard work 
and as far as I know KTechLab's code-base, most header files aren't ready to be 
a public interface. If the classes are for internal use only, this is not as 
important and it might be okay to have some "dirty" object-oriented design to 
make things more efficient, but it should look "good" from the outside world.

> Read it, understand it, improve it.
It's not that easy. Once defined, API should change as little, as possible. 
Every time, API changes, you need to touch a lot of code to refactor 
everything.


bye then
julian