2,561
edits
Recommended Property Tree Enhancements: Difference between revisions
Jump to navigation
Jump to search
m
Recommended Property Tree Enhancements (view source)
Revision as of 16:21, 1 November 2008
, 1 November 2008→Today's Practice
| Line 5: | Line 5: | ||
Simply put: property tree use in many places in FlightGear today is often following a very simple pattern, where the property tree is simply used as a (very) powerful and easy-to-use "dump space" for all sorts of data and runtime state stored in property tree variables, most of which often being completely typeless or at least very losely-typed, so that access to this state is at most also very losely-organized due to the lack of integrity-enforcing and access-limiting mechanisms. | Simply put: property tree use in many places in FlightGear today is often following a very simple pattern, where the property tree is simply used as a (very) powerful and easy-to-use "dump space" for all sorts of data and runtime state stored in property tree variables, most of which often being completely typeless or at least very losely-typed, so that access to this state is at most also very losely-organized due to the lack of integrity-enforcing and access-limiting mechanisms. | ||
While this flexibility can be tremendously appreciated from a user's point of view (because it makes it so much more intuitive and easy to use the property tree) this very flexibility (that is, the lack of typing-requirements and data-integrity enforcement mechanisms) can be considered to be a troublesome factor when it comes to ensuring (and optionally also enforcing) proper internal sim state to guarantee valid state for critical variables that may seriously impact simulator performance. | While this flexibility can be tremendously appreciated from a user's point of view (because it makes it so much more intuitive and easy to use the property tree) this very flexibility (that is, the lack of typing-requirements and data-integrity enforcement mechanisms) can be considered to be a troublesome factor when it comes to ensuring (and optionally also enforcing) proper internal sim state to guarantee valid state for critical variables that may seriously impact simulator performance. | ||
Thus, data flow dependencies need to be formalized and made '''explicit''' [http://www.mail-archive.com/flightgear-devel@lists.sourceforge.net/msg18066.html] in order to help FlightGear become more structured in its housekeeping department. Implementing these suggestions will automatically also help in other areas that are currently limited by FlightGear's current model of internal state management, such as for example by making it easier to implement support for dynamically switchable aircraft (for details, see [[FlightGear Sessions]]). | |||
== Problems == | == Problems == | ||