[Seaside-dev] Re: visitors

[Julian Fitzell]

On Wed, Oct 22, 2008 at 8:48 PM, Lukas Renggli <renggli at iam.unibe.ch> wrote:
> We could maybe go back to the mailing list?

Sure...

> It looks very good. It all looks a bit familiar, or do visitors always look
> the same?

I think they do. :) Though I grabbed a couple of ideas from Pier when
I cleaned it up so it probably looks more familiar than it otherwise
might. ;)

>> So I tried implementing Halos using a subclass of WATreeRenderContext
>> and it basically works, though it suffers from the same issue of
>> rendering order for delegations and so on. I think the code in
>> WAComponent>>acceptDecorated: would have to be pushed onto the visitor
>> to avoid that.
>
> Definitely. In WAComponet>>acceptDecorated: you enforce the order. The
> visitor should decide that.

Yeah, but I had that first and it felt weird somehow... perhaps you
could try changing that? I'd like to see how you approach it.

> I couldn't find the WAHalo code. I guess you didn't commit that yet?

No, I wanted to sort out the bit below before going further.

By the way, I notice now that #nextPresentersDo: isn't there,
WAPresenter isn't really abstract anymore (only #renderContentOn: is
unimplemented). There's no reason you'd implement a Presenter rather
than a View but I'd love not to need to have both. Not sure if the
inheritance allows it though... Decorations really don't need to have
#children.

>> Also, having made the context hold onto a Guide, I think we can now
>> move the rest of the way and say that render contexts don't need to be
>> visitors at all. The context can hold a Guide, it can hold a
>> RenderVisitor which knows the context. Then it can take the
>> implementation from WARenderingContext>>visitPainter: and the contexts
>> don't need to be visitors anymore, which seems cleaner to me.
>
> I agree. This also feels cleaner to me.
>
> I wonder if WAUpdateRootVisitor, WAUpdateStatesVisitor and
> WAUpdateUrlVisitor should also go to session and application? Maybe that
> would be a bit too much ...

How do you mean "go to"?

>> Finally, I think that the Toolbar can then just change the visitor in
>> the guide to a WADevelopmentRenderVisitor which can render the halos.
>
> Yeah ;-)
>
>> But now I'm *really* done looking at this.
>
> Then merge it. I find it convincing.

Maybe we should try to get some kind of release out before merging?

>> By the way, I don't think we should let this hold up an Alpha. What
>> else do we need to do and how can we get it done? If don't just do it,
>> we never will...
>
> Getting the distribution working. Or at least some form of the distribution?
> Otherwise people are unable to test it. And I don't want to manually build
> images, as I did up to now.
>
> To get my builder properly working I need better information about the
> packages. Explicitly given dependencies and descriptions.

I'll try to take a look at your WAPackage stuff then...

Julian