[Babeldoc-devel] Scanner changes...

[Dejan K. <dej...@nb...>]

Hi all,
1. I am planning to do few refactorings in the scanner module. I am not sure
if some of these should be left after 1.0 release but this is what I plan to
do:
- Renaming few classes. Personaly I think that using term "message" for
documents that are found using scanner leads to confusion. So I suggest
replacing all occurancies of 'message' to 'document'.  For example:
ScanMessage -> ScanDocument
ScanMessages -> ScanDocuments
IScanMessages -> IScanDocuments

Would this change cause problems? Should I leave original classes but
depracate them (Altough I don't see a benefit since users will probably use
only ScannerWorker class).

2. I am also moving most of functionality from ScannerThread to
ScannerWorker class. ScannerWorker will perform scanning and feeding the
pipeline. It will be abstract class (as it is now) and subclasses will
implement few methods for scanning specific resources. Subclassing
ScannerWorker should remain the same.
Moving logic to ScannerWorker will enable us to use different sheduling
methods for the worker. I plan to use Timer and TimerTask for scheduling
instead of thread. This will disable paralel working of two scanners since
TimerTasks are executed one by one in the same thread. I also plan to add
some methods for management purpose to prevent deadlocks. I am not yet sure
how this will be implemented but some kind of timeout period should be
defined and another thread shoud check each worker if timeout period has
elapsed and kill it if it has...

3. I was also thinking of using seconds instead of milliseconds for period
option in scanner configuration. Does anybody use scaning period less then 1
second? I guess no. This is also more user - friendly, we should not force
users to think as us - developers. I guess milisecods was used in the first
place because Thread use miliseconds in its methods (Am I right, Bruce?)

Since Babeldoc 1.0 should be released soon, I think 2. should be left for
versions after 1.0.
1. and 3. could be changed now.

Any opinions?

Dejan