[TYPO3-ect] News about XCLASSES?

[Ernesto Baschny [cron IT]]

Michael Stucki schrieb am 23.08.2006 10:56:

> Is the Extension Coordination Team really the right group to support any
> future work on the XCLASS principle?

I think yes. One of the projects coordinated by the ECT is "Modern
Extension Coding Guidelines", which in my opinion should include use of
modern patterns. The output of this project can be used in future TYPO3
development, in that we asses what extensions need and provide a
framework to do it in a "modern" way in the Core.

> In my opinion this supports exactly the opposit of our main goal:
> Coordination between extensions. This includes that changes should be sent
> back to the author of an extension instead of being forked with the help of
> an XCLASS.

Most XCLASSes don't extend another extension but extend some core
functionality. We could provide hooks for every method and class we can
imagine and continue working with the hook-based approach, which would
be the natural alternative to the XCLASS/decorator. But then you will
have to make hooks for every XCLASS that we currently have.

The idea in 5.0 will be to have components and objects, so extending
their functionality in extension seems a natural thing that we might
accomplish. As those classes should be much better organized (and
smaller), a framework based on the decorator or some other similar
pattern might be a welcome alternative for the XCLASS.

> I think the goal of us should be that no extensions use XCLASSes anymore,
> instead they are _only_ used by target users who want to quickly change a
> behaviour without modifying upstream files.

Exactly, but this is why we need an alternative to XCLASS. Extensions
still need to be able to "extend" TYPO3 core with new functionality,
this is what makes TYPO3 so beautiful. :)

Cheers,
Ernesto