Re: Plans for gnome-vfs replacement

[Alexander Larsson <alexl redhat com>]

On Mon, 2006-09-25 at 13:00 +0200, Tim Janik wrote:
> On Mon, 25 Sep 2006, Alexander Larsson wrote:
> 
> > On Sun, 2006-09-24 at 14:33 +0200, Philip Van Hoof wrote:
> >> On Wed, 2006-09-20 at 12:31 +0200, Alexander Larsson wrote:
> >>
> >> Hey Alex,
> >>
> >> Great that you are planning to redesign the VFS.
> >>
> >>> Here is my current GInputStream:
> >>>
> >>> struct _GInputStreamClass
> >>> {
> >>>   GObjectClass parent_class;
> >>
> >> Using GTypeInterfaceClass here would make it much more easy to let
> >> library and application developers implement the GInputStream interface
> >> in a for-their needs suitable way.
> >
> > I'm well aware of interfaces. In fact my initial version used an
> > interface for this. However, there are other aspects of the equation
> > that has to be taken into account to. For instance, using a base class
> > means you can inherit functionallity from the baseclass. This makes it
> > much easier to implement things, because we can do the fallback async
> > wrapper in the base class, and it makes it much easier to do wrapping of
> > streams.
> 
> not taking side on the interface vs. object issue here. however note, that
> you can provide default implementations for interfaces with GType, simply
> by hooking up class function pointers in the class_init function passed
> when registering the interface type, i.e. just like with object type
> registration.

How does this work in say a Java binding. There you can't specify that
you implement an interface without having all the methods in the
interface, and there is no way to chain up. 

Furthermore, you might want to store some data in the parent object to
handle the default implementation, and I'm not sure where you would do
that in this case. g_object_set_data() seems a bit ugly.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
 Alexander Larsson                                            Red Hat, Inc 
                   alexl redhat com    alla lysator liu se 
He's a scrappy shark-wrestling boxer possessed of the uncanny powers of an 
insect. She's a strong-willed tomboy politician from Mars. They fight crime!