FAQ 28.10 Is it a good idea to use a best of breed approach when selecting container classes?

FAQ 28.10 Is it a good idea to use a "best of breed" approach when selecting container classes?

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Not usually.

For small projects, it's often desirable to select each component using a best of breed approach. That is, select the best of breed in category X, the best of breed in category Y, and so on.

But for large, mission-critical projects, it is very important to reduce the overall system complexity, and selecting the very best container classes could actually make things worse (see also FAQ 39.08). Most vendors' GUI frameworks are designed to work very well with the vendor's container classes. In some cases, this increases the integration costs of mixing container classes from one vendor and GUI classes from another. Database, network, and other infrastructure frameworks are similar: it is often difficult and/or risky to mix libraries and frameworks classes from different vendors.

When this mix-and-match problem occurs, the low-cost, low-risk approach is often to select the container classes that "go with" the rest of the infrastructure. Usually that means that the container classes are less than ideal, often frustrating programmers who don't see the big picture. But remember: the goal is to reduce the overall system complexity, and container classes are only one piece.



C++ FAQs
C Programming FAQs: Frequently Asked Questions
ISBN: 0201845199
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2005
Pages: 566
Authors: Steve Summit

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