Re: [General] Container interface and AbstractContainer

[James Strachan]

On Thursday, August 14, 2003, at 11:19  am, Greg Wilkins wrote:
Alex Blewitt wrote:
> And you've still got the array, which was what I
meant in my last e-mail.
Some people like arrays, some people like Collection, others
prefer iterators.  I can see all sides and am happy eitherway,
so long as you are consistent.   However - JMX is not very
Collection friendly, well many JMX agents anyway.  Thus keeping
to simple types where possible is best.
I do prefer to use Collections where possible...

But we still don't have a method to iterate over all the
Components, or get them all.  So either we need something like
    ListIterator getComponentIterator()
Why not just Iterator? I don't see the benefit of ListIterator.
Because:
  + Order and reverse order are important.  You want to stop
    the components in the reverse order you started them.
  + Doing some operations like removal via the iterator
    can also be simpler, more efficient and less prone to
    simultaneous modification problems.
Remember ListIterator is-an Iterator so folks can treat it like a 
normal iterator.

public interface Container extends Component {
  public Iterator getComponents();
  public void addComponent(Component component);
  public void removeComponent(Component component);
}
Make that a ListIterator and I'm 95% happy.
Add the conveniance method for getting an array of ObjectNames
and I'm 100%
+1
How's this?
public interface Container extends Component {
  public ListIterator getComponents();
  public ListIterator getComponentNames();
  public void addComponent(Component component);
  public void removeComponent(Component component);
}
Though as soon as I did this something hit me - if you add a component 
by itself - and a component doesn't have an ObjectName (at least on the 
Component interface today) then how does the Container know the 
ObjectNames of the components? i.e. how can we implement the 
getComponentNames() method?

Maybe I've not grokked this code fully yet but either Container needs a 
getObjectName() or the addComponent() method should take an ObjectName 
right? This is echo-ing Jan's previous comment that Component should 
have a method...

        ObjectName getObjectName();
(Jan - you used a String in your previous mail - did you mean String or 
ObjectName - am guessing the latter).

James
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