in reply to Notes from the Refactoring Ward
Along the lines of revdiablo's post, you could put this into a database table. ;-)
Actually, in the same project where I use Tasks and TaskManagers, I use an XML-like data format to store these commonalities. So, in that spirit, I'd suggest an XML file:
Because, not only is this the part of the code most likely to undergo changes, but you can get others to make those changes instead. All that perl code I've written for handling our data files, and now some manager-type can come along and add, remove, or modify the data from which I do my work, and things work exactly the way they think it should.<todo> <item> <string>foo</string> <number>42</number> <url>http://google.com</url> </item> <!-- ... --> </todo>
Imagine your manager, or someone completely outside of your group, wanting to add 25 new URLs to scrape. You can tell them to add it themselves, while you go work on more interesting things. Ok, so you have to spend some time training them on this simple data. But when they come along and add another 25, and want to modify 30 others, well, you don't need to care.
At least, that's the theory. In practice, it has just made things so much easier on me that I've been able to devote time to improving other things. Which is still worth it.
(It also allows me to use the VCS system to determine the changes to the data vs the changes to the code, which is also worth the effort.)
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