Since we already started to define some component interfaces I think we also should start thinking about a component model which loads / connects such components. Maybe there are also some existing solutions we might want to look at (I must confess I didn't really search yet).
I guess a requirement for such a component manager would be that it can load and connect components at runtime and that the specific implementations which are loaded can be configured. It might also be good if the same component implementations can be linked at compile time (i.e. statically) which could have benefits on embedded platforms, but I'm not sure if we really need this. Another requirement would be that the components can be written in different programming languages (i.e. C, C++, Java, ...). It isn't really a problem to solve this for C and C++, but can we also easily support other programming languages? A simple way to implement such a component model in C would be an approach similar to the one Tim Ellison described in [1] where he explains the structure of the J9 VM's portability library. I started writing a proof of concept implementation for this, and I'll add it to the wiki as soon as it's finished. It would be interesting to have several such proof-of-concept implementations of component models which we can study and the decide which to use. We could even write "import mechanisms" for the different component models so they can import and use components from another model too (of course this would normally imply reduced performance). Regards, David. [1] http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/incubator-harmony-dev/200509.mbox/[EMAIL PROTECTED] -- David Tanzer, Haghofstr. 29, A-3352 St. Peter/Au, Austria/Europe http://deltalabs.at -- http://dev.guglhupf.net -- http://guglhupf.net My PGP Public Key: http://guglhupf.net/david/david.asc -- Pinky, Are You Pondering What I'm Pondering? I think so Brain, but if we had a snowmobile, wouldn't it melt before summer?
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