spent some time chatting with steve last night, about, among other things, interoperability between merlin and other container solutions. There's several ways to manage interoperability...
Interoperability types
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1) component contract support. Steve has explained that the merlin model will change to support different container-component contracts. This is basically a merlin-internal design issue.
2) assembly contract support. Like being able to read phoenix configuration files. While its probably possible, I don't really see this one happening.
3) code-level integration. There's two kinds:
a) passing an initialized merlin instance could be passed on to PicoContainer to use a parent container, or to jicarilla as a dependency provider.
b) passing an initialized instance of XXX on to merlin as a dependency provider. Option (b) requires significant change to the merlin model and will likely not be explored in detail until the merlin internals stabilize somewhat more. It's currently hard work.
my interest is in option 3a).
The basic interoperability use case, 3a)
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After creating a merlin instance in whatever way makes sense, an entity (or several that can be masked using the facade pattern) needs to be exposed that supports the following logical operations:
Object get( Object key );
boolean contains( Object key );
void release( Object componentInstance );
DescriptorStuffOfSomeKind keys();Steve has explained to me that these operations are in some way buried inside a fully deployed DefaultContainmentModel (and materials accessible from those).
The idea is to figure that out and define a graph walker of sorts that retrieves and releases things from and to the model. This walker can live in merlin as some module and be reused in other container models.
I bashed my head against that a little last night, but it didn't work.
any takers?
-- cheers,
- Leo Simons
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