Tracking Snow Leopard and Clever Configuration Tricks
Today I've been doing a little Snow Leopard tracking - following all those folks that got Snow Leopard on the opening weekend and reporting their successes and failures. I'm really surprised that I have as much 'unusual' software as I have - Growl and Dropbox are the holdouts to be sure, but a ton of apps have released 'Snow Leopard' releases. Great for me, I'll try to upgrade this coming weekend.
I was also facing a tough update cycle with an application I'm working with. I needed to change the source app so that it published more data that could then be read by the 'receiver' app and presented to the clients. I didn't want to have to go through two QA and release cycles, but there didn't seem to be any alternatives.
Then, while talking to my manager about the issue something popped into my head - clever configuration! Currently, my 'collector' app looks at the data received from the 'source' - a URL-referenced web server, serving up XML files. It parses this data and then works on it. But what I really wanted to do was to have the additional information in the parsing. However, it's also valid to think of adding that in the configuration of the 'receiver'.
What I decided to do was to add optional, additional, configuration to say "for this URL, here's the 'overrides' for the values you'll be reading". With this, I was able to very easily set up the additional information I needed without the need for the release of the other 'source' application.
I'll still add in the additional information to the 'source' application, but there's no need to wait for it and this opens the door for other overrides in the future. Pretty neat.