On 6/22/07, Matt Benson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Can we keep this discussion afloat? I've done a lot
of thinking on this issue over the past week and a few
days ago I had the epiphany that an Object-enabled
PropertyHelper is legitimate if we think of the
"Property" part of the name as having a double
meaning: yes, it manages a Projects
Properties-as-in-Hashtable<String, String>, but it
could be made to assist the IntrospectionHelper
further if it can be configured with delegates who
know how to generate an object from a notation. Can
you see it coming? We've arrived at my other pet
issue: decoding a Resource from a String. Change the
behavior of replaceProperties such that a string which
begins with a property and is completely consumed
after that property has been parsed returns the object
directly. If some delegate returned e.g. a Resource,
the IH would first try to assign that directly before
reverting to its existing String configuration
behavior. Once I made this realization I looked back
at Costin's comments and saw this was exactly where he
was headed.
Bearing all the above in mind, it seems useful at the
very least for property retrieval and string parsing
(related but separate concerns) to have the potential
to return an Object. Given this, the concern over
System.properties having Objects shoved in, and the
momentum of PropertyHelper having at least
theoretically supported Object properties for all this
time, I don't think there's much reason to stop Object
properties cold, even if we vocally discourage their
use.
I'm sorry Matt, but I read your email carefully, and I'm not sure I
got much out of it. Maybe it's doing C++ now that slows down my brain,
but I'm not following. What's that IH connection you talk about? What
string parsing?
Right now, property references in attributes or text elements are
expanded to strings (which I like ;-) and then IH does it's thing and
converts that string to whatever type the task or type needs. Clear
separation of concerns. Furthermore, these property "de-references"
can be mixed with litteral text and/or other property "de-references",
so if de-refing a property somehow returned an Object, that would
force IH to somehow map an array of Strings and Objects to instantiate
a type????
Sorry to be so thick.. --DD
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