[MUD-Dev] Re: PDMud thread summary

[Vadim Tkachenko]

Niklas Elmqvist wrote:
> 
> It was with a small amount of glee I found this quote by Vadim, which I
> have now shamelessly ripped out of its context. :)
> 
> On Fri, 23 Oct 1998, Vadim Tkachenko wrote:
> 
> > Recently I with amusement realized that a lot of developers can't
> > clearly think in terms of abstraction levels. One more thing which is
> > directly related to the portability (and even more, to the good design)
> > is abstraction levels and modules as abstractions.
> 
> Agreed. I would argue that abstraction levels are quite important in a
> complex project like this,

Don't. Examples (top to bottom):

Client/server communication
	transaction adapter
		CORBA transaction adapter (implementation)
		stream adapter
			socket connection (implementation)
			http connection
				HTTP/1.0 connection (implementation)
				HTTP/1.1 connection (implementation)

Object persistence
	storage system
		filesystem storage system (implementation)
		database storage system (implementation)

And each indentation level is an abstraction level, and each paragraph
is a module abstraction.

> the
> average Joe should not need to know about down-and-dirty details such as
> the driver, threading, module management, etc except the bare bones. If we
> fail to do this, then people will just continue building from scratch.

Well, there's one objection - while you're absolutely right about the
average Joe who's going to just build the stock MUD using the framework,
it doesn't apply to the people who would like to contribute to the
framework development (the more time passes, the more amused I am about
my own addiction to this stuff ;-). Then the abstraction level for the
API user is shifted down, and for example the average Jane who wants to
improve the storage system performance by adding a caching scheme will
not indeed care about fundamental differences between the db storage and
fs storage from the above example (which are on even deeper abstraction
level), but definitely the level of abstraction is way down from the
Joe's.

> -- Niklas Elmqvist (d97elm at dtek.chalmers.se) ----------------------

--
Still alive and smile stays on,
Vadim Tkachenko <vt at freehold.crocodile.org>
--
UNIX _is_ user friendly, he's just very picky about who his friends are