[xsrcg-devel] Program Design Updates

[Adam B. <co...@di...>]

Okay, Jesse and I had a pretty long talk this evening on IRC. Hopefully 
we can all three get together there soon. Max, you might let us know 
what time is good for you locally, since you're the odd one out, and 
hopefully Jesse and I can try and be around at that time...just a 
thought.

On to the business portion now. We talked about a lot of stuff and 
eventually got into some good ideas on how to approach the program 
design. Both from a cross-platform standpoint and from a general design 
standpoint. We seem to agree that the best way to do this would be to 
break away all of the back-end work into a separate library. There are 
several key advantages that'll get into below and neither of us see any 
real drawbacks to this design.

Now, it might seem overly long, but I'm listing this stuff for three 
reasons. First, to catch you up on where Jesse and I are in our 
thinking. Second, to sort of distill the conversation and have a 
reference for emails while we can't IRC. And third, to have a copy of 
these reasons listed for archival purposes.

First, speed. By breaking the guts of the program into a self contained 
library we can write it in pure C and do it with a minimal of fuss. 
This will give the workhorse part of the program a good boost in speed 
and efficiency.

Second, portability. This seems kind of obvious. The library would be 
written in C and could be compiled under multiple platforms. We or 
other people could then take the library and write an interface (GUI or 
not even) on top of the library to perform tasks in other environments 
and other operating systems. This will lend well to an OSX/Unix/Windows 
hybrid. The OS X stuff will be able to stay Cocoa and will be native, 
while the other operating system would benefit from being able to have 
native support as well. Obviously Windows support isn't really a prime 
focus, but if it becomes an issue this approach will make it easy to 
address. In addition, other platforms such as Palm and other handhelds 
could conceivably take advantage of the library.

Third, it will aid development of our primary applications. By breaking 
away the library we can work on the library code separate from the GUI 
code. Thus development of one won't be sacrificed to development of the 
other. We can have a bare bones skeleton of the library in place 
quickly for the GUI to interface with while it's developed and the 
library could use simple text based checks while it's being worked on. 
Also, once the code of one part is in place, it won't be as reliant on 
the other.

Fourth, flexibility. By breaking the workhorse code away into a library 
it gives us a huge amount of flexibility as to what we want to do with 
the code once our basic goals are met. Some ideas were presented in the 
portability section, but conceivably we could do quite a bit with it, 
as well as allowing other people to build upon the library for their 
own needs, if they want to pursue something we don't have the time, 
resources, or inclination to pursue. Which could include a Windows 
program or any number of things.

Fifth, expandability. Once the basic library is set, which will include 
the basics of handling a character and such we'll be able to expand on 
that. However, we won't have to add it in the same library or in the 
same piece of code. We can avoid unnecessary bloat by adding further 
features into additional libraries. Things such as Cyberdeck creation, 
gun creation, spell creation, vehicle creation, etc. can all be added 
on an as needed basis into any program by keeping things in seperate 
self-contained libraries.

Now, a lot of that seems to address issues that don't concern us at the 
present moment, but that's the final reason to be thinking about it 
this way. It gives us a program design that's flexible to just about 
any needs in the future.




Alrighty, there's a good list of basically the arguments we came down 
to for the use of this design. We can't really think of any drawbacks, 
so if there's anything that comes to mind with you  Max let us know. 
Also, if you want to address anything feel free to let us have it. :-)

Also, Jesse might feel free to add anything I left out, if I did.

It's late, and it's time for me to get some sleep.

Nighto!

--
Adam Brown
co...@di...