aMess

a Messaging Program

aMail Returning Data Fromat (aRDF)

To avoid aMail dependence on the returned data types the aRDF is used. This simply consists of the values returned consisting of a hash in which each hash element is a value returned.

This allows a decoupled model for the data managed by the core and the one returned by each module. Compare :

($one, $two, $three) = $handle->get_values();

against

%return = $handle->get_values();
foreach ( keys %return ) {
    print "$_: " . $return{$_} . "\n";
}

The second way (aRDF) is more flexible and can be easily be extended while maintaining compatibility with older code. This also allows an easy coding, because there's no need to modify the code when a new module version is added that returns new values: they will be automatically ignored with no run-time or compile time errors due to unmatched values returned.

aMess

a Messaging Program

aMail Returning Data Fromat (aRDF)

aMess

a Messaging program