Hi, every time I'm writing a piece of code, and need some helper class which I assume is already implemented somewhere (since my requirement sounds quite generic), I can't help but get the impression that we have hundreds of helper implementations, of which 95% are unknown to 95% of us developers.
That is, comphelper and unotools (my two favourites) alone contain more than 100 files, not to mention cppuhelper, salhelper, and (for higher levels) tools & svtools (plus maybe more). The most files therein are completely unknown to me (side note: though they are young enough that the interface they implement should have been announced in [email protected] :( ). Maybe it's only me, but somehow I believe that a lot of us don't even know the goodies which hide in the various *helper places, and thus either unnecessarily re-implement them, or simply produce code which could have been more elegant, and/or more robust, and/or easier to maintain, and/or easier to read, ... (continue at will). What I would like to suggest is some kind of "Helper of the Day" initiative. People who know a certain piece of (helper) code in one of the above-mentioned projects should introduce this piece to others, shortly saying what it is (and perhaps what it is _not_) good for. Ideally, this means just copying the code's documentation into an email, less ideally, this means writing this documentation first. Those mails could, in irregular order, be posted to some list (probably [EMAIL PROTECTED], or [EMAIL PROTECTED], or ?). If we give them a tag (say: [HOTD] :), and a good summary, this could create an informal pool of information. Such an initiative would require at least - potential readers - would somebody else except me consider this useful? - potential writers, which volunteer to spend a little of /their/ time to save more of us /a lot of/ time. What do you think? Ciao Frank -- - Frank Schönheit, Software Engineer [EMAIL PROTECTED] - - Sun Microsystems http://www.sun.com/staroffice - - OpenOffice.org Database http://dba.openoffice.org - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
