scott <scottw <at> qbik.com> writes:
Yep. All straight now. I know understand your breakdown of calls to callbacks is very similar to that inherent in SDL. And yes, you/we/it are fully asynchronous.
I'm assuming you prefer this to the reactive object version? Which does a pretty good job of hiding the comms Oh yeah, and doesnt require selection of the method to call in either the receipient or the client (on response), i.e. at the point of making a method call.
Maybe we're down to a matter of taste?
Yes, I guess it depends on whether you're familiar/comfortable with the message passing paradigm, or whether you're more comfortable with C++ shenanigans to obscure the messy details. I would postulate, however, that wrapping the details to allow binding at the call site (or message post) is slightly superior, due to the removal of the dispatch. Of course, this minor gain may easily be outweighed by the contortions required to make it work, and the reduction in the transparency of the code...
I hadn't realised how integral the state machine was to your design until I read your other post. Still, if you are doing dispatch on both message code and object state, it can be simplified to bind the message to a per-message code dispatch function which then dispatches on object state.
Characterizing of reactive objects as a framework for state machines would be a little bit sad. I'm not sure it was your intention to say that so just in case others are listening, I will elaborate from my POV.
Sorry, I read too much into the example code in the other message. I assumed the messaging would be an independent layer, but that the design you were using must have the communicating objects modelled as state machines. Thanks for clearing that up. <snip>
The messaging facillity has _no understanding_ of what the recipient does with a message. Proxies and state machines were intended to highlight the benefits of that design.
To summarize; the Reactive Objects that I currently consider our target would communicate via a similar mechansim and there would be no assumption that a Reactive Object was a state machine, or a proxy, or anything except an object that accepts messages.
Yes, that all sounds good.
Cheers, Scott
Matt