OO Futures

[tamhas]

At PUG Challenge Americas, Julian discovered that one of his sessions was going to nearly duplicate a session given by Gus on Monday, so he yielded his slot to a nearly spontaneous session that was originally termed an OO Birds of a Feather, but which because an OO Info Exchange. Rob Holzel, Evan Bleicher, and Shelly Chase did the usual info exchange thing of telling us what was new in the coming release and then sharing roadmap and more distant future items. The audience got to provide input, both to prioritize items and to add any items which they thought were missing (as long as they pertained to OO ... there being efforts to add other things as well). This was a really fabulous exchange and we spent 15 minutes of the Language and Tools Info Exchange the next day repeating the list for those who had missed coming to the original.

Based on my notes and some corrective feedback, I have replaced my seven year old OO Wish List on OE Hive with the lists from this session. Have a look here http://www.oehive.org/OOWishList and provide feedback to your favorite product manager, developer, or just discuss on public forums.

 

[GregTomkins]

Super interesting, thanks for posting! (I am resisting the urge to throw in my $.02 ...).

 

[tamhas]

Throw away.

 

[GregTomkins]

Ok, here are two (so that's $.04?)

1. About reflection -- not sure this is what you mean, but for us, it would be hugely helpful to be able to dynamically discover the signature of a .P without having to run it first. We have built a whole process to work around this, but it's probably not very efficient and it's kind of messy IMHO.

2. I'm surprised to see sugary things like 'single line comments' and 'multiple variables in one statement' on a list like this, but if you must, please add '++'

Can you explain what Singleton on AppServer means? I am familiar with the notion of Singletons in Java, I don't see what the issue is in ABL though.

 

[tamhas]

Note that all of the features listed here apply to OO ... and thus don't apply to .ps.

Which said, I believe that the signature of a procedure is obtainable now, along with the the internal procedures. I would cite the syntax, but I am in the midst of a version change and don't have the documentation handy at the moment.

Small things are worth doing if they are easy.

I seem to recall ++ being mentioned, but don't see it on the list. I'll ask.

My understanding of the Singleton, Single Run references means that one could instantiate an object over an AppServer call, run a method, and return a result in a single round trip, thus permitting the use of a stateless AppServer and obviating the need for a .p wrapper.

 

[tamhas]

++ was, in fact, mentioned as one of a group of coding "shortcuts". I have added it to the list.