[webkit-dev] A proposal for "Platform Mechanisms"

[Anders Carlsson]

On Jun 16, 2010, at 5:55 PM, Darin Adler wrote:

> Sounds reasonable to me. We already follow pointers and use virtual functions for all these things, so I don’t see them adding a lot of overhead.
> 
> Would these Mechanism classes replace all the current Client classes?

Like Kenneth said, these are more like "global clients". I don't see the benefit of replacing our current Client classes.

> Would the mechanism objects be obtained once and cached globally? How is the initial PlatformMechanism object created?

My current design is a bit different from the example I gave in my original mail. The getter functions are not virtual, but the functions to create the various mechanisms are. Something like:

class PlatformMechanism {
public:
	PluginMechanism* pluginMechanism()
	{
		if (!m_pluginMechanism)
			m_pluginMechanism = createPluginMechanism();
		return m_pluginMechanism;
	}

private:
	virtual PluginMechanism* createPluginMechanism() = 0;

	PluginMechanism* m_pluginMechanism;
};

> How is the initial PlatformMechanism object created?

WebKit will create a class that derives from PlatformMechanism. In the WebKit initialization code we'll create an instance of this class and set it as the platform mechanism using a setPlatformMechanism call.

- Anders