[webkit-efl] Use of pimpl idiom for Ewk classes

[Kenneth Rohde Christiansen]

Hi there,

This sounds really nice :-) and is what Qt has been doing for long, so
I am very supportive of this effort.

Deos this mean that we can get rid of all of the private C methods?

Kenneth

On Thu, Oct 18, 2012 at 10:56 AM, Dumez, Christophe
<christophe.dumez at intel.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Mikhail and I are currently working on refactoring the Ewk classes to make
> them more C++-like, more convenience to use and less bug-prone.
> As part of this work, we came out with a proposal: Use pimpl idom for Ewk
> classes.
>
> The Ewk classes are currently defined in the private headers, with all their
> members public. The private headers also usually contain C-style functions
> to interact with the Ewk class from inside WebKit.
> Now, we would like to get rid of those private C functions and replace them
> with C++ methods in the Ewk class. The issue is that the Ewk class members
> are currently public meaning we can alter the members directly from outside
> the Ewk class implementation and bypass those class methods.
>
> At the same time, we don't want to make all the Ewk class members private
> and create getter / setter methods for all of them. Not only this means a
> lot of refactoring work and extra code, but also, this means that are public
> C API implementation will need to go through those getters / setters as
> well, instead of interacting with the class members directly.
>
> We therefore thought of using the pimpl idiom so that the class members are
> now stored in a POD struct in the cpp file. This effectively prevents access
> to them from code other than our public C API and Ewk class methods, which
> is what we want. The C API functions can still directly interact with the
> Ewk class members which is convenient. We can get rid of all C functions in
> the private headers and replace them with Ewk class methods. Therefore, the
> coding style in WK2 EFL port implementation with be more C++ oriented.
>
> I created a meta bug for this task:
> https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=99696
>
> I also wrote a first patch to show what the result looks like for the
> Ewk_Download_Job class. The patch also adds convenience macros to
> ewk_private.h to make pimpl idiom usage simpler and less error-prone:
> https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=99697
>
> We hope you like the result as much as we do.
> If everyone agrees, Mikhail and I are planning to port other Ewk classes to
> this proposal and update the WebKit EFL coding style.
>
> Kr,
> --
> Christophe Dumez
> Linux Software Engineer, PhD
> Intel Finland Oy - Open Source Technology Center
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> webkit-efl mailing list
> webkit-efl at lists.webkit.org
> http://lists.webkit.org/mailman/listinfo/webkit-efl
>



-- 
Kenneth Rohde Christiansen
Senior Engineer, WebKit, Qt, EFL
Phone  +45 4093 0598 / E-mail kenneth at webkit.org

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