SPUG: Runtime binding, drivers
Trevor Leffler
tleffler at u.washington.edu
Thu Oct 10 11:12:43 CDT 2002
Brian Ingerson wrote:
> On 08/10/02 17:26 -0700, Trevor Leffler wrote:
>
>>Hi all,
>>
>>I've been researching the implementation of "drivers" in Perl, and am looking
>
>
> What type of drivers are you talking about? You can't do kernel loaded
> drivers in Perl by definition. Perl is linked with the libc, and those system
> calls can't be made from kernel code, AFAIK.
>
> Cheers, Brian
I am not talking about hardware drivers or other low-level kernel nastiness.
Sorry if I scared people off with that terminology! Rather, I'm am interested
in DBI/DBD-style drivers. Or perhaps I should call them "implementations
conforming to a defined interface." Perhaps some tangible, if silly, code would
help show my thoughts.
--------
my $dog = new Animal("Animal::Dog");
my $cat = new Animal("Animal::Cat");
$dog->speak("Fork over your bacon!");
# Output: "Woof! Fork over your bacon! Woof!"
$cat->speak("Don't rub my fur the wrong way.");
# Output: "Meow! Don't rub my fur the wrong way. Meow!"
--------
Think about how DBI works here. We ask for two animals, a dog and a cat, both
of which conform to the Animal interface (one method, "speak", which takes a
string). Our $dog is actually an Animal::Dog object (not an Animal object),
which implements the interface in its own special way--it prepends and appends
"Woof!" to the passed string. Likewise, our $cat is an Animal::Cat object.
The implementation might be in pure Perl, or XS, or whatever. The point, and my
queries, are about the architecture that could make this possible. Do I look to
DBI as a model (ugh) or are there other models to follow? I keep bringing up
DBI only because I'm unaware of other Perl modules that do what it does.
BTW, I've already coded something that works, but I'm really interested in some
discussion of this topic--your experience with this, pros and cons of model A vs
model B, if you have no experience with this then what do you think it *should*
do or behave. How would you design it?
Thanks,
--Trevor
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