Properties Idea

Properties give solution to the sequence of problems:

• Initialization order problems
• Dependency/updating
• Undo/Redo
• Save/Load
• Optimization (central point)
• Safety (detect errors)

Properties Kinds

• Property
  • ObjectProperty - A property which holds a reference to a single object.
    • FinalProperty - One time write property. Once set, its value never changes.
    • AutoProperty - Smart property. A property which automatically monitors the information it depends on. In order to work, it should rely only on other properties and immutable values.
    • ResourceProperty - A property which holds a mutable resource. Useful for mutable non pro things like swing gui elements.
    • ValueProperty - A property that has a reference to an object and allows getting and setting it.
      • ParentProperty - Property which will hold a link to parent for parent-child relations.
      • UndoProperty - A property which holds the undo manager for given bean. If the bean does not have such property, the properties try to locate UndoManager up (to parent).
  • ListProperty - Basic list property. Holds references to many objects.
    • ChildrenProperty - Property which manages list of children for a child/parent relation.

How to apply properties to Sophie 2.0

• To get rid of the fields, except for immutable classes, and public static final things.
  • Note that final instance fields are not so safe, because they are initialized after the super constructors.
• To convert mutable classes to ProObjects
• To gather more requirements to the properties library and apply them
• To keep the properties library with high quality, because everything else will depend on it.
• To be careful of cyclic dependencies (like a = b + 1, b = a + 1). No library can solve them.