[Asterisk-java-devel] ChannelFactory for Live

[Colin W. <co...@bi...>]

Following along on the recent addition of a ChannelFactory for the agi
package, I was thinking of implementing something similar for the live
package.  I have a question regarding architecture before anything
significant can be accomplished.

It seems like in the actual meat of the live package, nothing uses the
interfaces, they all use direct references to the *Impl classes.  For
example, in the ChannelManager.addNewChannel method, it directly creates an
AsteriskChannelImpl object.  For example,

>  final AsteriskChannelImpl channel = new AsteriskChannelImpl(server, name,
> uniqueId, dateOfCreation);

as opposed to

>  final AsteriskChannel channel = new AsteriskChannelImpl(server, name,
> uniqueId, dateOfCreation);


In addition, many of the methods called on these objects are only available
in the AsteriskChannelImpl object, and so the objects are all stored as
Impl's.  This works great, but poses a problem with the addition of a
ChannelFactory.  In order to correctly implement a ChannelFactory, it must
either:
1. return subclasses of AsteriskChannelImpl.  This would force the
AsteriskChannelImpl object into public scope, which is probably not a good
idea.
2. return classes that implement the AsteriskChannel interface.  This would
be a more correct method to follow, but it would also require significant
refactoring of at least the channel tracking portions of the live package,
and possibly more.  This could break backwards compatibility with the API,
as some methods may need to be moved from the AsteriskChannelImpl class to
the AsteriskChannel interface.

If there are additional options, I'd love to hear them.  I don't have a
problem with doing all the refactoring mentioned in the second option, but
I'd prefer to get confirmation that such sweeping changes have a chance of
being accepted back into the master branch.  I'd very much prefer to
contribute the changes back into the project than keep them to myself or
fork.

Thanks for any advice,
--Colin

-- 
Colin Williams