[MacRuby-devel] kvo vs referenced hash

[Matt Aimonetti]

Hi list,

 Coming from a Ruby background, I try to understand and pick the best from
Obj-C/Cococa and learn how to use brilliant ideas to improve my coding.

Tonight I was working on a simple demo app to learn how things are done in
the Obj-C world and see how they would transpose to the MacRuby world.

Everything went well until the KVO question came along.

Let's say I have a controller that we are going to call *Brain*.
We also have a lot of simpler objects that don't do anything but having a
state and being displayed, we are going to call them *Task instances*. The
brain is called every X seconds to "*think*".

My understanding is that an Obj-C developer would register all the tasks
instance with the brain using a KVO and the brain would send notifications
when it's being called to "think".  So, every time a new task is being
created, an observer is added on the brain with the new task key. Each Task
instance has an observeValueForKeyPath:ofObject:change:context: method
implemented which checks that the notification is meant for itself and if it
is, to act accordingly.

While the concept is simple and attractive. I wonder if it wouldn't be
simpler to forget about kvo's and simply keep the list of registered tasks
in the brain and the brain would call the tasks directly and tell them to
change.

It sounds to me that in the MacRuby world, it would be more efficient. If we
have 250 tasks for instance, when a notification is being sent, every single
task in the 250 tasks created, will receive the notification and will check
what to do with it. If we had a simple hash/dictionary in the brain, we
could directly find the task to handle and call it directly without having
to go through the 250.

Am I missing something or in this specific case and because we use Ruby, KVO
aren't the way to go?

Thanks for your help,

- Matt
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.macosforge.org/pipermail/macruby-devel/attachments/20090905/eea3ccc1/attachment.html>