sergio_101 wrote
i am currenty develop an app in seaside, and am wondering about best
practices when using external packages.
I've found the easiest and most flexible approach is two-fold:
- Refactor the underlying library with the hooks and abstractions you need
- And then, subclass
If you just override and monkey-patch, I feel you are more vulnerable to the library changing underneath you, as well is potentially making your code harder to understand. If you can make the library designed to use it the way you want, you will reduce duplication and the chance of someone else coming in and doing it in an incompatible way, as well as give the library maintainers an idea of what you're doing, so they may consider that in making non-backward-compatible changes.
Of course, that's ideal and requires library maintainers open to accepting such changes, but in practice I've found this to be true (with Pharo, Magritte, BabyMock…)
Cheers,
Sean
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