On Jun 16, 2005, at 10:52 AM, Daniel Salama wrote:

> Hello all,
>
> I've been playing with Squeak for some time and have a question. if  
> I wanted to use a Squeak instance to serve different applications  
> (say multiple applications using Seaside), how unique do classes  
> need to be? Sorry for the vague question. Let me be more specific.
>
> I have two applications that both need a class Customer. However,  
> one of the application requires that class Customer have a set of  
> attributes and methods very different from the second application  
> who uses the class Customer for a totally different industry.
>
> If I create a category for each of the applications, can I have a  
> class Customer for Category A and another class Customer for  
> Category B?

If they have different names, yes :-)

I would approach it in a different way, like have a CustomerBase  
class that has all the attributes and methods that are common to both  
your industry specific customer types, then have IndOneCust and  
IndTwoCust subclasses that implement the specific attributes,  
methods, etc. for each of those. (Obviously you would want to use  
more indicative names for your subclasses.)

Each of those subclasses can be in different categories.

hth,

Brian


>
> In a way, I think I'm going to try to answer the question myself,  
> but would prefer to get clarification or validation from you guys,  
> who are much more experienced than me. The Smalltalk way would be  
> to reuse code as much as possible. Therefore, I should probably  
> carefully design a class Customer so that it may be sub-classed  
> into more specialized classes such as IndustryACustomer and  
> IndustryBCustomer. Is this the Smalltalk mentality? Coming from  
> other environments which don't "encourage" you to work efficiently  
> may be what's confusing me.
>
> Thanks,
> Daniel
>
>
>