From: Carl Youngblood <carl.youngblood@...>
Date: 2004-08-29T09:42:05+09:00
Subject: Design advice

I'm in the process of writing a ruby version of perl's Palm::PDB
family, which allows you to write and read Palm database (PDB) files
for a number of Palm OS applications like Phone Book, ToDo, Datebook
etc.

FYI, documentation of Palm::PDB is here:

http://aspn.activestate.com/ASPN/CodeDoc/p5-Palm/Palm/PDB.html

PDB files have a generic header format and hold one or more records,
each of which is in an application-specific format.

The approach of perl's Palm::PDB is to create an abstract record
handler class and create a new child of the record handler class for
each application.  The Palm::PDB class calls the record-handling
functions of whatever handler the programmer includes.

I'm debating between this approach, and simply creating a parent PDB
class with empty functions for handling records and creating
descendents of this parent class with filled-in methods for record
handling as well as application-specific methods.

Any suggestions?

Thanks,

Carl Youngblood