At 02:45 PM 9/3/01 +0200, Erik Vanherck wrote:
>
>>This design is proving to be no good when trying to implement more of the
>>spec. So we are attempting to come up with a new design to layout the
>>objects. We are in desperate need of developers who can contribute to the
>>redesign.
>
>Hmmz, that does not sound good for the overal development. Are you gonna
>start over or actually refactoring the current version ? The design as it
>is now appears inside the code seem to be a bit of spagethi like but if you
>are redesigning that would explain a lot. I guess if you are the code will
>be up to date inside the CVS but the readme files and such are badly in
>need of updating.
The original design, going back to James Tauber, is pretty clean, and well
thought out. Problem is, the design really anticipated only the simple
situations; as soon as we started hitting complex decisions (keeps,
footnotes, floats, etc) then the infrastructure wasn't really there.
Unfortunately, and this happens in OS, momentum of coding carried us well
past the point where we simply ought not to have added any more code.
The elegance of code that has been added in the last 12 months in particular
is inversely proportional, usually, to how closely it is related to core
layout. It _is_ spaghetti, but it's more the implementation that is
spaghetti, the top-layer, not the design.
It's not a start-over situation, but a fair amount of refactoring and
rethinking does need to happen. And we have been thinking about it. The mail
archives for the list are worth searching, and you should read Keiron's
recent doc at http://xml.apache.org/fop/fop.pdf.
Your help is definitely appreciated.
Regards,
Arved
Fairly Senior Software Type
e-plicity (http://www.e-plicity.com)
Wireless * B2B * J2EE * XML --- Halifax, Nova Scotia
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