Release Cleanup: Day 6

Today I scheduled towards cleaning up all of Odysseus’s “traits”. To my surprise they were all simple enough that they hardly needed tidying up at all. Sure there’s some FIXMEs in the error reporting trait, but I’m not sure how to fix them at the moment, they’re not serious bugs, and the code remains clear regardless. The biggest thing I did there was to extract the singleton code for a WebKit.WebContext out into a new “service” whilst keeping most the configuration in a trait. This was done to maintain an ideolized dependency graph between my Model, Services, Traits, & UI layers.

To lay this ideal out:

• Models build upon nothing more than WebKit if that and are depended on by the UI layer.
• Services are depended upon by traits and are triggered either by the UI layer or through the initialization of traits. They may bring in their own 3rd party dependancies.
• Traits depend on WebKit, services, and possibly the WebTab widget. Beyond some initialization code (which gets bundled up with the initializers of all other traits and some services), they are triggered exclusively by WebKit or the services.
• The UI builds upon GTK+Granite to wrap WebKit. It shouldn’t depend on any traits other than to initialize all traits, though it may build upon certain services and the models.
• Internal pages are enabled by a particular service, and are provided to be integrated into the UI and/or traits.

This ideal doesn’t quite apply, and I don’t plan for it too, but it’s extremely close to the reality.

Organizing traits

The biggest change I had to make was in adding some organization to the traits, for which I decided to group them by the extension mechanisms they use. This organization scheme, for example, may not suite bookmarks and history extensions, which would have components in both the autocompletion and navigation groups (in addition to their own internal webpage). But then maybe it’s good to seperate out those components.

The simplest of those groups was the concept of autocompleters. These extend the AddressBar via the Completer service rather than a WebView, and include the DuckDuckGo integrations as well as logic for implying an “https://” prefix on web addresses.

In the remaining there seemed to be two distinct groups. Navigate traits register to WebView signals related to page navigation and doesn’t do much to the UI other than to navigate to a different webpage, if it even does that. Decorate traits on the other hand listen to a variety of other WebView signals and they often respond by customizing the WebTab.

Wow, this blog post looks longer than my diff files today! I guess there was a bit to discuss about my thinking on these changes.