Hi, "Andrew C. Oliver" wrote:
> > I'm trying to learn enough about avalon to do this. I'm having a hard > time of it. After I read the conceptual documentation and see a couple > of code samples I'm like "now what?" I need a "hello avalon" tutorial > to help me.. . U/f I can't write one (chicken and the egg kind of > thing). I still am having trouble figuring out how to do something like > this via ant or even if ant is the right tool.. (I mean I love it for > builds but for this??) MAybe I have a mind block :-) Ok. I have a few deficienies in my personality: I'm reading texts of other people mostly superficial, writing mails to forums, bevor i'm really completed with thinking and some more, which i will tell you later. Ant could be used for writing configurable indexing engines, but that smells little bit like misuse of ant, you're right for that. I've also had a look at avalon last week: To me it seems like the standardization of the meta pattern [interfaces, factories, proxies, managed objects, etc..]. Exactly the same kind of coding, which shines through kelvins code. So avalon itself is merely a collection of interfaces, Abstractfactories etc. It is surely a starting point for architectural considerations, but doesn't deliver anything more (kind of academical). Where do my thoughts differ from yours? I think of a more generic generation and transformation framework (The cocoon framework is doing that (in a modified way) with the generation and transformation of html/xml via sax events.) The framework should be useable for different kinds of generation and transformations (e.g. reading a database and writing the result as a xml-file). Therefore it needs a flowmap configuraton: A sample configuration could be a JDBCDataSource followed by a dispatcher, which routes the data to the correct DocumentHandler on the basis of the data mimetype. The DocumentHandler extracting the texts and giving them further to a consumer, which could be a lucene index. I'm working on something, to make that more clear, espacially a configuration file (dummy) and some Interfaces. I am not really sure, if this level of genericity is desirable. Over-genericity is one of the badest things in programming. On the other hand, i don't think, that it isn't possible and it could be an adventure and fun. And maybe we could save us some refactoring efforts. Although i agree with you, that iterative and incremental development is the best thing to do, i would encourage you to strive for a architectural metapher, that will stand the times. regards, Manfred -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> For additional commands, e-mail: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
