[Somelib] So are you talking about dynamic interfaces?

[John P. <jpa...@et...>]

>Of course, I could put some sort of interface functionality into a base
class,
>something like a map of strings to strings.  Base::setParam("name", value)?
>The interface spec in SOMEClassInfo would have the names, descriptions, and
> types.  We'll see.

Dynamic scriptable interfaces.  I thought of this.  I was actually going to
go down to the C++ level and look at vtables in order to dynamically resolve
methods.  In theory all I would need was an object reference (the data),
find the class it was associated to and do a vtable lookup.  In practice
this is hard to do which brought me to the same conclusion you have stated
here - using an interface.  This is sort of how Java does it.  The other way
(which is actually the same way but with automation built in) is to use the
SWIG toolset.  This is a nice way to get C++ objects into scripting
languages.  Check it out at www.swig.org.

On another note. I was just recently at the San Jose Linux World discussing
Bonobo (the GNOME object model) with one of the Helix Code developers.
Bonobo is built over Corba and from what I heard pretty fast once things are
binded.  The thing I wanted to find out was if we were reinventing the wheel
here.  My conclusion was that what we have is a fast and simple object model
that fits very easily into any C++ project (I in fact want to test it with
the plugin system for Half-Life bots to see if I can extend HL to run more
than one type of bot AI at a time).  All the other object models out there
are more or less for application development and tend to trade off speed and
simplicity for other factors. That is of course except Piers XPLC which has
similar but different goals than us. Of course we make trade-offs too. Such
things as in-process objects can cause an application to crash miserably if
a SOMEObject is coded bad where as Bonobo is out of process (each object
resides in its own process and communicates through ipc).  Well just some
things to think about as we figure out our goals.  Hopefully in the future
we can add bridges that allow for SOMEObject to be loaded from other object
models and visa versa.  Imagine gecko (Netscapes rendering engine) embedded
as a SOMEObject making it easy for people to use it without learning XPCOM.

John Palmieri