Re: [Jsynthlib-devel] Switch to JTree for the device list?

[Joe E. <jo...@em...>]

Now that (I *think*) my JTree changes were reverted, I'll mention some 
of the other changes I thought of when I was implementing it.

------------
Cleaning up DeviceListWriter and DevicesConfig

Right now, DeviceListWriter *writes* the synthdrivers.properties file 
while DevicesConfig *reads* it. This isn't very good encapsulation. One 
class should handle all management of the file. This should be either 
DevicesConfig or a new class. DeviceListWriter is only needed for it's 
static main() class so that users can force a scan of the synthdriver 
directories to generate a new synthdriver.properties file, so that's all 
it should really do: scan directories and then request that 
DevicesConfig save the new settings to a file.

------------
Further cleaning of DevicesConfig

DevicesConfig currently tracks the classname, drivername, IDstring, etc. 
all in separate hashtables mapping each string to the classname. So, to 
find the IDstring by drivername (like "AccessVirus"), it has to go to 
the drivername hashtable, look up the classname for that driver. Then, 
go to the IDstring hashtable and find the key that points to that class 
in *that* hashtable.

This has two problems. First, it's a little disorganized and 
inefficient. Secondly (and more importantly) is that this will lead to 
problems if we ever have a single class that drives multiple devices 
(like a V-Amp, a Bass V-Amp, and a V-Amp 2). In a case like that, 
multiple keys in the IDstring/drivername hashtables would have the same 
class... and trying to look up a key based upon a value in the hashtable 
will yield unpredictable results.

The remedy I propose is to make a class called something like 
"DeviceDescriptor" which would house all of the important info about a 
device (name, classname, manufacturer, type, IDstring, etc.) and then 
have DevicesConfig maintain an array or vector of these descriptor objects.



Provided that I *wait* until the 0.2 release is branched/tagged before 
doing this, does anybody have any other objections to this?

- Joe