Leo Simons said:
Timothy Bennett wrote:
What could be simpler than merlin?
trust me, things can be a lot simpler than merlin
And the next step would be pico-container, right?
nope. Tweety started as an experiment on figuring out the absolute minimum one could put into a container and call it "avalon-framework compliant". PicoContainer just throws most avalon-framework patterns and concerns overboard. It's radically different.
One thing that quickly became clear with the obslolete tweety codebase is the various areas where it is not avalon-framework compliant. The next step would be implementing full compliance. The conclusion I and others arrived at was that the resulting code would not significantly differ in complexity from the code in fortress and hence would not be of a lot of value.
You can say a lot of things about merlin, but certainly not that it is "only the minimum". Merlin provides an array of features in the area of assembly, deployment, distribution, versioning, declarative programming, etc etc, that go way above and beyond "the bare minimum". There's a complexity/flexibility vs simplicity tradeoff. The downside with complexity which we found something like Tweety addressed well was the steep learning curve.
And the final step a design pattern without any code ?
Again, nope. Avalon-Framework is the next step taken after starting with a few design patterns (IoC, SoC, SOII, COP). Tweety came near to being "the other side" (the container side) of those patterns. What you're getting at is that to build an actually broadly usable container, there's other things (not yet so clearly captured in any design pattern) you need to add. Sure.
I'd also add that to build an actually usable application platform, you take your broadly usable container and add various domain-specific materials, and packaging.
Merlin encompasses that whole picture and vision. But I suggest you don't dismiss stuff that implements only a part of that picture as useless. After all, COP is all about composing complete applications out of small parts.
Anyway, the archives have more details and background :D
cheers!
- Leo
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