[Zope3-dev] N-Tuple Adapters

[Leonardo Rochael Almeida]

On Mon, 2003-06-02 at 18:42, Shane Hathaway wrote:
> I've been pondering the idea of "n-tuple adapters".  The idea is that 
> some adapters require multiple independent inputs.  Steve came up with 
> the good name.
> 
> [...] 
> 
> Would three-tuple and four-tuple adapters be useful?  Well, in thinking 
> about all of this, I realized that n-tuple adapters are generic problem 
> solvers.  When querying the adapter registry, the application provides 
> inputs and asks for a component that can solve some problem using those 
> inputs.  An n-tuple adapter registry is the digital version of 
> MacGuyver: you have a chess board, a clothesline, a match, and shoes. 

ROFL :-)

> How are you going to start that car? ;-)  Adapters, especially adapters 
> that accept multiple inputs, add a limited form of problem-solving 
> intelligence to the system.
> 
> With n-tuple adapter registries, we might begin to solve a whole new 
> class of problems.  There could be numerous applications not only for 
> Zope, but computing in general.

This smells like prolog.

> There's just one snag: how would we search for n-tuple adapters in a 
> scaleable way, taking interface hierarchy into account?  A naive 
> implementation would perform a multi-dimensional search, where the 
> number of dimensions corresponds with the number of items in the input 
> tuple.  To find an adapter that accepts (IFooFolder, IHTTPRequest), we 
> have to search for a registered adapter that requires a set of 
> interfaces, in the following order:
> 
> 1. (IFooFolder, IHTTPRequest)
> 2. (IFolder, IHTTPRequest)
> 3. (IFooFolder, IRequest)
> 4. (IFolder, IRequest)

And this smells like Java type-based Method Resolution...

Cheers, Leo

-- 
Ideas don't stay in some minds very long because they don't like
solitary confinement.