Greetings, Looking at the UML page Tom has posted a few minutes ago made me remember something I had in mind for some time.
With hope of avoiding any flame wars and attempts to discuss elegance of various approaches in OO approach, may I suggest that the specs use inheritence instead of generics in the future? This is purely based on the current state of some key technologies. At the moment XSD has no generics support and Java's generics (or parameterized types) support has a feature (read: problem) called type erasure. XSD is the basis for both system to system and tool to tool communication, and that will not change for a significant time. So XSD based marshalling/unmarshalling to code will be reality for a while. Java is.. well it is Java, and its handling of generics won't change for at least a few more years. Most uses of the generics seem to use upper bounds for type parameters, so those cases should not be too hard to replace with inheritance with the upper bound as the type of fields that use generics at the moment. For unbounded type parameters (which are rare) we could define some assumed types in the implementing systems and either use an abstract class or find another workaround. That'd be a nice OO practice. This is a note I wanted to write somewhere. It may cause issues in terms of existing code bases and data, it may not be worth the effort, but in a world where algorithmic stock trading can justify a $1.5 billion cable between London and Tokyo to improve latency by 60ms, I should have the luxury of leaving my mark about this design choice ( http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/122989-1-5-billion-the-cost-of-cutting-london-toyko-latency-by-60ms) Kind regards Seref -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://lists.openehr.org/pipermail/openehr-technical_lists.openehr.org/attachments/20120321/80fa4dee/attachment-0001.html>
