[Zope3-dev] Need help with jargon

[Stephan Richter]

On Friday 02 April 2004 11:05, Gary Poster wrote:
> >   utility                          singleton
>
> + 1.  I think this is an improvement for a number of reasons, not least
> of which that I find 'service' and 'utility' to be somewhat
> interchangeable in sentences--and in fact, when they are not, an example
> 'utility' is 'electricity' (essential), while an example service is
> 'cleaning' (not essential :-).  But that's probably a controversial
> argument.  I'll leave it by saying that 'singleton' does convey useful
> information, as Steve argues.

I am surprised this gets as many +1 as it does. 

The more I think about it, the more I think it is mislabling these components. 

- The word singelton is widely known in OO programming as a class for which 
only one instance exists. This is not the case with utilities at all. A 
TranslationDomain utility gets initiated many times and there are a lot of 
its instances in the utility service. The only thing that is unique is the 
(interface, name) pair of a utility and the instance will always be the same. 
But that's important, since local utilties have state.

- A global service is much closer to a singleton. Well, it usually is a 
singelton that gets initiated right after the class is declared. But even for 
global utilities we have several instances.

I would really urge people for a better term. I still think that utility is a 
good term. Maybe we should look for something else for multiadapter.

Regards,
Stephan
-- 
Stephan Richter
CBU Physics & Chemistry (B.S.) / Tufts Physics (Ph.D. student)
Web2k - Web Software Design, Development and Training