The Past
--------
(Here's my perspective on the history of Rat, as I recall it now.
Hopefully it isn't too controversial. Please feel free to jump in with
clarifications...)
Rat arose from an itch of mine, and I coded the core of Rat as an
experimental project, playing around with some unconventional
architectural ideas. With hindsight, once other people wanted to start
using it too, I really should have just sat down and completely
rewritten the core code. By not doing so, I inflicted a world of
craziness and pain on the community and ecology which sprang up around
Rat. But by then, it had become hard to fix as higher quality peripheral
code sprang up around it. Apologies.
The Present
-----------
Thanks to Manuel Suárez Sánchez and GSOC, we have an opportunity to
adopt a more sane and sensible core design with good test coverage that
will be easier and more enjoyable to maintain and comprehend going forward.
AIUI Google likes to be able to access a copy of the GSOC code, so I've
suggested that Manuel codes on GitHub
(https://github.com/elnuma/creadur-rat). Hopefully, this should allow
people with GitHub forks (mine is
https://github.com/itstechupnorth/creadur-rat) to pull in Manuel's code
and give encouragement and advice. Apache has recorded an ICLA for
Manuel, so when we're ready we should be able to start patching in pull
requests.
The Future
----------
(Bit of a strawman - hopefully the community - including Manuel - will
dive in with suggestions and we'll be able to gain consensus on a design
direction...)
...
I wonder whether it would be simpler and more conventional to factor out
three phases:
1. scan the source, building a strongly-typed, immutable domain model
2. analyse this model against policies, building a strongly-typed,
immutable report model
3. use the report to output descriptive text or XML, or errors and warnings
I also think that Rat would benefit from
* using more conventional dependency injection (see, for example,
http://www.martinfowler.com/articles/injection.html) replacing the
static methods that litter the code
* immutable domain objects with builders
Opinions...? Improvements...? Objections...? Alternatives...?
Robert
