RE: [curl-email-news] a couple things

[<gh...@nc...>]

On 2 Nov 2001, at 8:15, Dan Breslau wrote:

> I'm very interested to know what sort of design tools
> you're looking for: Visual design tools (like PB), or 
> class design tools (like Rational Rose), existing 
> code packages (and if so, what kinds?), or something
> completely different.  Not that I can promise to
> provide it immediately, of course :-)
> 

I wasn't thinking in terms of design tools but more in terms of 
design guidelines and recommendations.  Here is the line of 
thinking that this question grew out of.

When I finished my first PB app I was extremely pleased and proud 
and it did everything that it was supposed to do.  However, if I had 
been able to look back on it two years later I would have seen 
newbie written all over it.

PB is an extensive and robust language and there are almost 
always multiple ways to implement any specific functionality.  After 
working with the product daily for months and years you acquire a 
repertoire of techniques that have proven to be good ways to do 
certain things.  These may have come from trial and error or they 
may have come from books, PB's classes, web sites, etc.  If you 
are new to the tool, most of the techniques you come up with will 
not end up in the best practices manual.

I would be so bold as to assert that everything stated in the  
previous paragraph applies to Curl too.  However, we're kind of 
short on people with years of experience with Curl.

I think I was fishing for two things when I asked my question about 
resources that would assist our design.  

One is sample code for implementing various functionality that is 
commonly found in Windows apps.  I'm thinking here not only in 
terms of code attached to individual objects but also to how many 
levels of inheritance make sense to do certain things and what 
kinds of things you do at which levels in various object hierarchies.

The other thing that I was hoping for was some fairly specific big 
picture guidelines for organizing a sizable Curl project.  What has 
been proven to work well for splitting functionality amongst various 
packages and multiple developers.

I've been digging through the code on the Curl web site and on 
curlexamples.com and these are certainly a big help.  Perhaps it is 
too early in the evolution of Curl to come up with any kind of a best 
practices manual but I thought I would ask the question with the 
hope that we could avoid as many pitfalls as possible.

Gene