SPUG: Runtime binding, drivers

[Trevor Leffler]

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


 - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
     POST TO: spug-list at pm.org       PROBLEMS: owner-spug-list at pm.org
      Subscriptions; Email to majordomo at pm.org:  ACTION  LIST  EMAIL
  Replace ACTION by subscribe or unsubscribe, EMAIL by your Email-address
 For daily traffic, use spug-list for LIST ;  for weekly, spug-list-digest
     Seattle Perl Users Group (SPUG) Home Page: http://seattleperl.org