The framework shouldn't wag the app

December 19, 2007 • 1 min read


This post is over ten years old. Chances are, I've learned enough to have advanced my thinking about some of this stuff.

The app should wag the framework. Wil Shipley of Delicious Monster wrote yesterday about how, when given the Core Data framework’s “free” undo, he ended up doing contortions to make the feature work for him:

Well, I have undo in Delicious Library 1. It’s not “magic” like with CoreData, but it works. In fact, now that I am thinking about it – I’ve spent months and hundreds of lines of code trying to get CoreData’s “magic” undo to work, when, in fact, there are really only FOUR actions that are ever undone.

I’m not sure what happens more often: people not letting a framework do what it could easily do, or people forcing a framework to do something that would be easier done by hand. Don’t peel your potatoes with a knife, but don’t peel your pineapples with a potato peeler. Actually, you should try that.


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