Re: [Webmacro-devel] ContextTool replacement and thread-safety

[Marc P. <ma...@an...>]

On Sat, 26 Jul 2003 13:49:18 -0700, Brian Goetz <br...@qu...> wrote:

>> I give up. We're chasing in circles.
>
> After all this effort, I am really wondering what concrete gain the
> user community gets out of this.  No one has (yet) put forward
> compelling use cases for why we would want lazy-loading for anything
> other than tools, or why the tools interface is inadequate, or what
> other context-aware thingies besides tools there are.  That's not to
> say there aren't any -- but I think the thing we're all struggling
> with is that we don't know why we're talking about this.  At least I
> don't.

Please see my latest "AHA! ..." post on this. It might solve some confusion 
:)

> I know that there are things about ContextTool which are aesthetically
> displeasing.  But I'm struggling to see how the WM user community will
> be better off in a year if we do this now.  (Making the code
> incrementally cleaner is not a strong enough motivator.)

I think my new post shows this - applications can add lazy variables of any 
kind they like, not having to implement ContextTool factories, and 
optionally implementing ContextAware on those objects if they do need the 
Context.

> I think this is the problem -- I guess I need to see how the users
> will benefit, but I don't yet.
>
> And therein is the problem.  I think it is just premature to talk
> about code changes without a clear, shared idea of how the users will
> benefit.  Anything else is putting the code before the horse.

Yes, completely correct. Lane might have been implementing something by now 
if we hadn't continued the discussion :)

Cheers
-- 
Marc Palmer
Contract Java Consultant/Developer
			
                        w a n g j a m m e r s

                 java and web software design
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