"Ross J. Reedstrom" wrote:
On Tue, Sep 14, 1999 at 02:24:21PM -0500, Evan Simpson wrote:
[snip]
(unless rendering the object is **very** expensive; what then?).
[snip again]
Personally, I can't think of an example of an object that would be _that_ expensive to render: What sort of thing are you envisioning in that catagory, that wouldn't already be represented as it's own object?
<shrug> The possibility occurred to me, so I thought I'd mention it, but I like your solution just fine. The only example I can think of isn't necessarily *expensive* to render, it's just *unreliable*: Suppose you're drawing on other websites for content, as in a Slashbox. Contacting the other site can take an unpredictable amount of time, and may fail. If it fails, you don't want a broken object, you just want to keep the results of the last successful render. As you point out, in this situation it would probably be best to have a special object to explicitly store the result, and use some sort of scheduling mechanism to call a re-render-attempt method on it periodically.