Re: [Adobe-source-devel] asl-users: Upcoming changes for 1.0.28 release

[Sean P. <sp...@ad...>]

On May 10, 2007, at 9:52 AM, Tony Van Eerd wrote:

> I don't use much of the code directly, so maybe I don't have a good  
> feel for it, but from your description, it sounds like a lot of  
> fundamental changes for something that you are trying to lock down  
> and maintain support for going forward.

A lot of this work has been kicking around on the drawing board for  
awhile (the closed hash implementation was written as the dictionary  
replacement some time ago and has been sitting in /future). The  
request has been made to provide an interface that we can support -  
so to do that I'm locking down the binary representation to something  
I can define independent of the compiler and an interface that more  
closely conforms to standard containers. The new representations are  
one that are designed so they can be specified in terms of a C  
structure.

The amount of code that uses (abuses?) the dictionary code in the  
widget library was a bit surprising and made the conversion more  
difficult then expected (converting the asl_dev library took less  
than an hour, converting the widget library took two days) - I  
believe the use of dictionary in the widget library needs to be  
reduced in two ways.

1) isolate most of the usage to the boundary between the parsers and  
the widgets - currently the dynamic types from the parsers have crept  
all the way down to the platform layer. This is both inefficient and  
fragile.

2) provide a better, standard way for extracting a dictionary into a  
struct - Ralph Thomas did some work related to this to make it easier  
to bind a C++ function to CEL - I think I can leverage some of the  
same ideas to solve this problem.

Sean