[MUD-Dev] Components and Inheritence

[Jon Lambert]

Joe Andrieu wrote:
> John Buehler wrote:
> >
> > But in an inheritance system, the parent and child classes cooperate in
> > providing behavior.  Parent classes can provide utility methods that child
> > classes can employ, child classes can ignore the parent implementation, or
> > incorporate the parent implementation into their own behavior.
> 
> It seems like the value of components is that it forces you to be
> strict and define your relationships clearly and cleanly, while
> inheritance allows a programmer to just run with the inheritance and
> do whatever, dealing with conflicts when they are a problem.  Or put
> differently, components allows the diligent programmer to write tight,
> clean code, while inheritance allows a looser mechanism for building
> out the codebase.
> 

I don't believe the use of a component approach is mutually exclusive  
with inheritence.  My view of components is that of black box inheritence.  
A component is a application relevant view of an inheritence tree
(or a Composite).   One can design a mud language that has multiple 
levels of functionality...it's glue, a fully functional OOPL that allows 
white box inheritence, and a component building language.  
I believe components are best used in conjunction with simple glue by 
non-programmers (tool-users).  These are the people you don't want 
"hanging themselves", not the mud library programmers (the tool-builders). 
Components and glue are the ideal "level" for your builders, creative
writers, and tinkerers which are players who have the capability in-game 
to build and assemble things.  

So I've decided on a multi-level approach to designing my MPL.  My mud 
language Aphrodite supports an Object Model similar to that of C++.  
Apollo is basically an interface definition language that is used to build 
components.  This all all brought together in Artemis a visual programming, 
creative writing and building interface.  A component is very similar to
an ActiveX module.  It is exposes properties that may be modified at runtime
via glue code or at design time.

--
--* Jon A. Lambert - TychoMUD        Email:jlsysinc at ix.netcom.com *--
--* Mud Server Developer's Page <http://tychomud.home.netcom.com> *--
--* If I had known it was harmless, I would have killed it myself.*--
 
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