Here's my take on it.

The idea behind your system, it seems to me, is that you want objects that are basically input-output neutral: they can be read from anywhere, and they can be written to anywhere. So what you want (and it sounds like what you have) is a series of polymorphic input and output drivers, such that you can provide a transparent transparent interface to the various input and output sources.

With that said, then, I would have one main object that doesn't inherit from anything. That object, in my system, would be of type "Obj". That's it. It would maintain *state* about its input and output drivers, so that when it came time to read and write this object, you could dispatch to the appropriate driver. So I might say:

    my $obj = Obj->get('DB', @params);
[download]

and this would, under the hood, do the following:

• load the Obj::Input::DB class (easy; just use require of eval "use")
• do something like

      Obj::Input::DB->get(@params)
  [download]

• give you back an object blessed into Obj

You could then set the output for your object, and do something much similar: load the proper class; call that class's "put" (or whatever) method.

The reason I would bless my object into Obj, rather than into a driver-specific input class, is that I find that confusing: your object is generic, and it's not tied to a particular input class. So why add restrictions that aren't already there?

With respect to inheritance, I'd have a main Obj class that inherits from nothing. That's your main object class. Then either one of two things:

• Obj would provide a generic interface to input and output: "get" and "put" or whatever you want. Then the input drivers and output drivers would inherit from Obj.
• You'd provide some abstract classes Obj::Input and Obj::Output--abstract drivers--that don't do anything, but which provide the interface to your drivers that *do* do something. Your input and output drivers would then inherit from these classes.

I don't know which I'd choose. The second option feels cleaner to me. But then what do I know.

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