On Feb 8, 2006, at 22:03, Simon Pepping wrote: Simon / Jeremias,
6. D5 (The FOUserAgent can return the FopFactory instance. (needed internally by FOP)): Why? Because FOUserAgent is the programmed way to get at configuration settings? Could it be better to implement get methods on the user agent which get the settings from the factory object (factory object not exposed)? Or even pass the factory object instead of the user agent (Cf. question 2)?
I agree with this comment in particular. I'd prefer to not expose the Factory, but implement accessors for the persistent settings. It even allows for a sort of flexibility where it comes to the so-called persistent data across multiple rendering runs...? A bit unclear maybe, so some further explanation: I'm also thinking in terms of on-demand loading of certain data, if requested so by the user agent. Once it's loaded, it will be readily available for another user agent. If no user agent ever requests it, it will never be loaded into memory.
If the factory would be exposed, and a lot of classes access it directly, the implied amount of checks whether certain features have already been loaded would be enormous. If this is centralized in the user agent, it becomes a lot easier to maintain.
Cheers, Andreas
