[pclasses-devel] FYI: official collaboration between s11n and P::Classes

[stephan b. <st...@s1...>]

Yo, s11n-devel!

i thought i'd make an "official" announcement that s11n and pclasses.com 
are "officially" colaborating now. The past week we have been 
feverishly refactoring P1.x into P2.x, but we have no timeline for when 
this will be finished. Christian Prochnow, the P project lead, has been 
gracious enough to allow me a lot of leeway in the P2 refactoring, and 
we've been making some great progress. P2 is going to be even more 
amazing than P1 already is :).

The plan isn't to integrate P support directly into s11n, because that 
would require a hard dependency on P. Neither will we integrate s11n 
directly into P (at least, that's not the current plan). Instead we 
will simply provide a middle-man API, ps11n, which is basically 
's11nlite with P support'. i have started refactoring s11nlite, in the 
1.1dev tree, to move most of it's interface into a class template, so 
that ps11n and s11nlite can share more core. s11nlite's interface won't 
change, but it's implementation will be a wrapper around the class 
client_interface<NodeType>.

i'm pretty excited about the collaboration, as it marks several 
"firsts", both for me and for this project:

- This is the first time i was contacted by another team about 
collaboration.
- It broadens the potential user audience for s11n.
- The projects are able to feed off of one another. For example, P2's 
factory/plugin layer was written from scratch to take elements from 
P1's and cllite's. Also, we developed a template-based way to allow 
clients to swap out the shared objects in the system, meaning that the 
core APIs can serve different behaviours to different clients if they 
want them to. We use this to transparently plug in the DLL support into 
the core API (which doesn't know about DLLs), for example.
- i'm learning a lot (that's not a "first", but it's always a nice 
bonus).

And - martin, this is especially for you, though i know you're out of 
town and won't see this for a while - Christian actually asked me to 
port their build tree from autotools to toc. :) At the moment AT and 
toc both work in the tree, proving that they can co-exist. i still need 
to port in a lot of obscure config tests, though.


Unrelated:

s11n 1.0 is frozen, and i will not be touching the tree any more, except 
possibly for updates to the documentation and example code. The tarball 
will be released on 1 Jan 2005, but note that i will see 1 Jan 2005 
much earlier than most of you will, so you may actually see it on 31 
Dec in your time zone.

Merry Christmas!


-- 
----- st...@s1...   http://s11n.net
"...pleasure is a grace and is not obedient to the commands
of the will." -- Alan W. Watts