Steve Spicklemire wrote:
Every couple of weeks I get a little time to work on this stuff... well, it's been a couple weeks. ;-)
Keep them coming :-)
the generic dataskins could simply acquire the methods that they need from the specialist....
This all begs some questions....
(1) Is this 'reasonable'? Is anyone else using methods of specialists this way?
Let's think of an example from real life. Let's say we have a Person class. We also have a Prison specialist. When a Person is in Prison, they are given a Prisoner propertysheet with properties like state_prisoner_id, security_category, admission_date, sentence_length. A person also has different capabilities when in prison. In general, people can do different things depending on where they are; behaviour depends on type and on context. In prison, a many of the things a person can normally do are forbidden; for example, acquire and spend money. There are also additional things a person can do: see their probation officer; book a family visit. I think your suggestion of having methods in a specialist that get acquired by classes managed by that specialist generally fits in with the thought-experiment of persons in prison. However, perhaps a Folder w/ Customizer Support, and methods in that folder that are made available via acquisition, is a better match still.
(2) is it worth enforcing the use by acquisition? e.g.,
I'm not sure what the benefit would be. Perhaps there could be a plug-in tab in a specialist for "methods acquired by rackmounted dataskins".
(3) Has anyone found a better way to adorn 'plain' objects with methods?
I've used ordinary acquisition, as described just above. You can use Transparent folders to keep things organized neatly. -- Steve Alexander Software Engineer Cat-Box limited http://www.cat-box.net