Re: [ROOT] ROOT, Java and remote script execution

From: Fons Rademakers (Fons.Rademakers@cern.ch)
Date: Thu Oct 05 2000 - 03:31:25 MEST


Hi Matt,

  I don't know what you mean. That for every class we should provide an
abstract interface? Maybe you should talk to people who sell air (i.e.
a bunch of empty interfaces), we are not in that business. Our interfaces
are in the $ROOTSYS/include directory. If you want to extend the behaviour
of a class, derive from it and override the methods you want. I doubt that
you would want to rewrite everything because that is what you have to
do if we would only provide abstract interfaces.  

Another more important point is that every major experiment nowadays 
seems to want to write their own unique insulation layer to separate 
themselves from any third party package (even if that package originated
and is controlled by their own HEP community). A collaboration wants to 
have full control over this layer because in that way they feel they 
are independent of the thrid parties. This indepence is needed because 
they might have to modify the layer to be able to accommodate another 
third party package. If we would provide our own abstract layer, then 
still experiments would write their own private layer to be independent
from our layer. This would result in layer on layer before reaching 
the real code.

So we provide working code, you provide your own insulation layer
(i.e. abstract interface). Everybody happy. 

However, if you feel that some of our classes are not complete and need
to be extended please feel free to let us know so we can try to fix the
ommissions. Or better, provide the missing code.



Cheers, Fons.



On Wed, Oct 04, 2000 at 10:15:07AM -0700, Matthew D. Langston wrote:
> Hi Suzanne,
> 
> Thank you for your post.  I believe you bring up a very important point.
> 
> We (ROOT users and developers) would benefit tremendously if we had an
> interface to the ROOT libraries which was separate from the implementation.
> It would allow for the possibility to develop third party libraries and
> applications.
> 
> So, may I ask the ROOT Team what are the plans for providing an interface to
> the ROOT libraries?  Could we expect this for ROOT 3.0?  If so, maybe the
> ROOT Team would consider soliciting feedback from the ROOT community on what
> the interface requirements would be?
> 
> Cheers, Matt
> 
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Suzanne Panacek" <spanacek@fnal.gov>
> To: "Matthew D. Langston" <langston@SLAC.Stanford.EDU>;
> <KOSU_FOKIN@garbo.lucas.lu.se>; <roottalk@pcroot.cern.ch>
> Sent: Wednesday, October 04, 2000 9:03 AM
> Subject: Re: [ROOT] ROOT, Java and remote script execution
> 
> 
> > We could also design our own parallel Java classes that would also be
> labor
> > intensive and almost impossible to maintain (who can keep step with Rene
> and
> > Fons?).  We could limit the number of classes we implement since now the
> > dependencies between the ROOT libraries are clearly identified.
> 

-- 
Org:    CERN, European Laboratory for Particle Physics.
Mail:   1211 Geneve 23, Switzerland
E-Mail: Fons.Rademakers@cern.ch              Phone: +41 22 7679248
WWW:    http://root.cern.ch/~rdm/            Fax:   +41 22 7677910



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