Utility In Utilities
Volume Number: 15
Issue Number: 6
Column Tag: PowerPlant Workshop
Utility in Utilities
by John C. Daub, Austin, Texas USA
Exploring the PowerPlant Utility Classes
In The Details
When you first learn PowerPlant, you must concern yourself with the larger notions
of The Framework - the event handler, the view hierarchy, the Commander chain,
Broadcasters and Listeners. These are core, foundational aspects of PowerPlant that
you must know and understand to begin writing applications in PowerPlant. After you
have the core down and have hacked out your first PowerPlant app, you start to
explore new areas of The Framework: perhaps the Networking Classes, Internet
Classes, Threads, AppleScript-ability. Those areas are certainly all good, however I'd
like to suggest one group of classes and code that you might not have thought to take a
further look at. All the little classes that exist in both cohesive groups and scattered
one-shots throughout The Framework - Utility Classes.
Utility Classes are an important part of any framework. They help you accomplish the
work you need to do by perhaps simplifying an API, or providing means to manage
other objects and states, or maybe just consolidate a lot of (perhaps commonly used)
code into a single function call. Utilities won't solve all of your programming
problems, but they certainly should prove to find a useful place in your toolbox as
they alleviate a lot of the headaches you encounter on a daily basis. Working the use of
such utilities into your coding habits can help you write more robust and
less-error-prone code from the onset.
General Framework Utilities
Most of the Utility Classes in PowerPlant can be classified into a couple groups, with a