The PlayOut classbuilder indeed separates this nicely. We have the
distinction between the "installer" and the "builder". The builder uses
an "installer" as a client and notifies it about stuff that happens.
For example we have an "anonymous subclass builder" that's implemented
like that. It basically just ignores most of the notifications of the
builder since it doesn't really do anything.
... but of course this means that you need PlayOut ;) You can get an
image at http://pinocchio.unibe.ch/~tverwaes/PlayOut.tar.gz
caveats:
- At the moment that system doesn't validate everything yet like the old
classbuilder (since I wanted to freely change classes with any name)
- it doesn't handle obsolete subclasses yet. Oh well ;)
- it's still intertwined with our slots implementation, so it relies on
Helvetia. But that can/should/will be fixed without changing the API.
cheers,
Toon
On 05/18/2011 03:18 PM, Mariano Martinez Peck wrote:
Hi guys. As part of the Fuel project, one of the things we want to do
(in fact, it is done) is to serialize classes. There want to have 3
possibilities:
1) Do something like DiskProxy where you only save its global name and
some selector to run when deserialing it
2) Really searialize the whole class (following method dictionary,
compiled methods, class pools and friend, etc) so that you can
deserialize it in another image where such class is not present.
3) Do the same as 2 but validating and installing the class in the system.
For 2) what we want to do is just to serialize the class as any other
object. As a result, we get a Class instance. Nothing is validated,
nothing is added in Smalltalk globals, nothing is compiled. We do not
use ClassBuilder at all.
For 3) we want to do 2) plus validating and installing the class in
the system. For validating I mean ALL the validations that the class
builder does when creating or modifying a class. And for "installing
in the system" I mean notify, put in Smalltalk globals, re compile
what is needed, etc...
ClassBuilder seems to do 2) and 3) together. So, what I would love to
have in a new class builder is to have those two things separated. So
that I can say to an object ClassManager validate: aClass or
ClassManager installClassOnSystem: aClass.
Do you think such thing is possible? Right now going through
ClassBuilder and understand all the validations it does is really
complicated :(
Thanks in advance,
--
Mariano
http://marianopeck.wordpress.com
