How Projects Work

First we give a short overview on how projects work internally, this will be discussed in detail in the following sections.

The basic functions the class Project provides for managing projects are "setup", "use", "unuse", "add" and "remove". The user must provide a project specific setup-method, she/he may provide init-, exit- and add-methods for the project which are called by the corresponding method on class Project.

The basic method for adding the classes, methods and items of a project is "use". When called for the first time "use" calls the user defined setup-method of the project. This setup-method declares which classes, methods and init-, exit- and add-method belong to the project and which projects the project depends upon, and it creates the items that should be managed by the project. "use" first calls "use" on all projects the project depends upon, then -- if the project wasn't already in use -- classes, methods and item are added and the init-method is called.

The method "add" is used when a project is added by selecting it from the manager's project list (the one you get by pressing the ``Project: add'' button). "add" first calls "use", then the add-method of the project. The add-method can define an object which will be put in the data hierarchy, finally information about the project and its author can be displayed.

The counterpart to "add" is "remove". The only thing "remove" does is to call "unuse" which, if the project isn't needed anymore, calls the exit-method and removes everything that was added by "use" in reverse order (items, methods, and other projects, classes are not removed for several reasons).