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From: "David Duddleston" <david@i2a.com>
To: "Avalon Development" <avalon-dev@jakarta.apache.org>
Subject: RE: Off Topic: FSF makes peace with rest of open source world
    (not)
Date: Mon, 4 Jun 2001 00:41:15 -0700
Message-ID: <FOEPJAHPOCCENDOCBMMPOEDHIJAA.david@i2a.com>
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> -----Original Message-----
> From: Peter Donald [mailto:donaldp@apache.org]
>
> hopefully there will be some more docs available soon (post ApacheCon).
> Until then feel free to ask questions or point out anything you feel is
> wrong ;)

Cool. After taking a quick pass through the documents, I sort of have an
idea of what I may need to do, but there is also allot I have not covered
yet. It seems that the area of most interest to me is the
...framework.component package... the ComponentManager and
ComponentSelector, along with reconfigurable. I don't have any specific
questions at this points as I want to go through the documentation a little
more first, but here is description of what I'm trying to do if you are
interested.

I will try and explain the basic component flow for one part of my
application which is a data miner / search engine. First the classes, there
is a URI, ConnectionHandler (protocol based), ContentHandler (MIME based)
and a CookieManager. A simple flow would be, a ConnectionHandler is
determined based on the URI protocol, lets say HTTP for this one. The URI is
passed to the HttpConnectionHandler and the handler grabs a CookieManager
and uses it to deal with any cookie related processing. Next it checks the
content type and gets a ContentHandler, lets say HtmlContentHandler, and
passes off the input stream to the ContentHandler... a few steps are skipped
in this description but I will assume you get the idea.

Now for the sake of argument, lets say I have several implementations of
each for the HtmlConnectionHandler, CookieManager, and HtmlContentHandler
(class/interface). Plus, I have several contexts (not shure if context is
the appropriate term) that require different configurations of the component
implementations to be used. Now for extra complexity, lets create a pool of
HttpConnectionHandler classes that can be reused in any context. I'll put
this scenario in an example. In this example the configuration in one
context requires that the implementation of the org.xyz
HttpConnectionHandler is used and the HttpConnectionHandler must use the
org.abc implementation of the HtmlContentHandler to handle the input stream
if it is HTML. When the HttpConnectionHandler is grabbed from the pool, it
needs to know that the com.foo implementation of HtmlContentHandler needs to
be used vs. com.xyz. As you can see, I need a framework to control the
components interactions, selections and configurations.

I hope this makes sense... I have a feeling it does, sense I think this is
the kind of stuff Avalon was created for and you people are doing this
extact thing already. Am I on the right track here?

-david


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