I did not interpret it that way. And I do need to look at skins if I ever want to do some custom layout or painting (which I actually would like to avoid J).
Take at look at the patch when it comes your way. I think its more natural than an include and no skins are needed. In fact it took me awhile to understand that I could not subclass directly from Component and use that in my program-pivot kept looking for a skin. I agree as well that an include is a natural way to contribute. I think it is important that multiple ways are available and I can see the influence of web-based programming models in pivot e.g. scripting on a "serializer page," includes, and other constructs. From: Greg Brown [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Wednesday, June 16, 2010 7:11 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: Can I use the serializer to initialize my component subclass versus reading a sub-object I'll take a look at skins. Most people are probably not going to write skins would be my guess though. Exactly - a typical app developer will use the include model, because it is intuitive and easy to work with. That probably came across a bit more pompously than I intended it to. I don't mean to imply that this is the best approach and that others are not worth considering. However, from personal experience writing a non-trivial application, I can say that the include model maps very well to the use case of modularizing an application's sub-components. As you can imagine, it is considerably easier to understand and work with than writing a custom skin, and so will probably appeal much more so to a typical app developer. However, based on what you have said, you are not a typical app developer - you are attempting to create reusable components that can be shared using a model similar to the framework components themselves. To me, that represents a strong use case for writing a custom skin. Please note that writing a skin is not something to be afraid of. It is nowhere near as complex as you might think, especially if you are extending an existing concrete class. Also, there are plenty of examples to draw from. G
