README

Reusable Objects

As the name of this repository suggests, here-in you will find a collection of objects with very distinct responsabilities, but with the capability of working toguether as a whole.

Some of these are entirely stand-alone objects, but some have some dependency on others. rtl in particular is often required by the other objects as this collection contains a great deal of small, highly re-usable classes.

In each unit you will find as a preffix the list of dependencies, so you can quickly evaluate if it suits your needs.

Under UnitTest there is a test project using the DUnit testing framework.

Installation

The only 'installation' required for using these objects is that you add the project folder to your compiler search path either on a per project basis or in your IDE Library settings (recommended).

Documentation

In addition to any README.MD files which may be found in various locations in the Reusable Objects repository, additional documentation might be available in each unit when necessary.

External Dependencies

There is no common dependency for every object class. Each one will have different requirements, and will state them in the unit itself. However, in order to compile the whole project as a package, you will require to have them all availble in the path. As of now, you will require the following:

• LibEay Extended (https://github.com/nunopicado/libeay322
• TZDB (https://github.com/pavkam/tzdbb

Use Guide

Each object will have its own how-to documentation. There is however some guidelines that will be usefull for every one of them.

All these objects are interface based, which means object memory is always managed and freed automatically. You don't ever have to call Free or FreeAndNil on any of these objects.

Another important issue is that you don't ever instantiate any of them with its constructors. Any constructor you may find are for self-use only. Every object has one (or more) class functions named New that act in fact as a constructor. The idea behind this approach is to force an interface instance, instead of a implementation class instance, thus avoiding memory leaks even when you don't have a variable to hold that instance. This method and all its advantages I owe to Marcos Douglas B. Santos, a great Object Pascal developer which came up with this elegant approach.

Seldom will you find procedures or properties in these objects. All methods will tend to be functions, and most of these will return the object itself, which means you will be able to chain method calls in one single statement.

Some objects are merely interfaced versions of existing components, and aim to allow a more streamlined runtime creation, without the need to free it's memory when it stops being needed. Of these, some will have a special function, Obj, which will expose the object itself to allow compatibility use with other components.

Licence Agreement

All the code in this object collection falls under the GNU LGPLv3, which you can read here: http://www.gnu.org/licenses/lgpl-3.0.html

The licence agreement applies to the code in this collection of components. It does not apply to any of its dependencies, which have their own licence agreement and to which you must comply in their terms.

Contributions

You may contribute for this project if you feel so inclined, either with bug fixes, enhancements or completely new objects. It is required however that the code you submit complies with the guidelines. Always interfaced, no constructors required, using the New class function to instantiate, no destructors needed, functions return the object itself whenever possible, etc. Just create a pull request on the main repository whenever you want to submit.