Re: [Webmacro-devel] More pruning

[Eric B. R. <eb...@tc...>]

On Tuesday, July 15, 2003, at 04:55  PM, Brian Goetz wrote:

>> Can we simply get rid of ContextTools completely?
>>
>> I've always found ContextTools to be too limiting to be useful.  In 
>> many cases, I've wanted CT's (specified via wm.properties) to have 
>> access to my application data.  Using the Context as a means to 
>> communicate back to my application seemed like a hack, so I just end 
>> up doing this:
>>
>>         context.put ("MyGreatTool", new MyGreatTool (_app));
>>
>> So I think we should just nuke CT's completely.  Eliminates the need 
>> to worry about if/when/how they're destroyed or gc'd.
>
> All of the tools that are in the WM distro are basically repositories 
> for functions -- they require little initialization and teardown and 
> have little state.
>
> So in some sense, the current refactor "demotes" them in that 
> direction.

right, but isn't there still special logic in Context.java in .get() 
that says "oh, we don't have <keyname>, let me see if we have a 
ContextTool by that name"?

All of this could go away too, if we just dropped ContextTools.

eric