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Saturday, March 16, 2002

UserLand has released the details of a new driver architecture for its news aggregator. Burningbird has some comments that I think are right on. I'm really only familiar with the C++ analogy and I think it is basically right. When invoking the method of an object in C++ you are basically doing a method lookup in a virtual table (vtable). If there isn't an entry in the vtable of your object, then the lookup continues to your superclass, which is kind of what is happening in the aggregator driver architecture. What might be kinda cool (though probably very difficult to get right) would be if the XML payload could contain its own driver. I don't actually think if is technically impossible. The driver is just a script (and it is essentiallly interpreted, as Burningbird points out) and that script could be contained within the XML of a news item. Of course, if the script is long and every XML payload had to contain it, well, that wouldn't be so much fun. But perhaps the payload could have a pointer to the driver script and if a particular driver didn't exist for that XML, then Radio could go get it, install it, compile it, and use it to parse the XML. That way you could subscribe to new kinds of news without having to worry about whether or not you have the driver for it. You just subscribe and it'll come for free the next time you get an update. comment ()  11:29:35 AM  #

© Copyright 2002 Will Leshner. Last update: 3/16/02; 11:29:36 AM.