943967 - Rename AsyncPanZoomController to reflect its increasing scope

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Core :: Panning and Zooming, defect)

Description

[Botond Ballo [:botond]]

These days AsyncPanZoomController does more than control asynchronous panning and zooming. A lot of event handling and gesture detection goes through it when it's enabled. Perhaps we should rename it to reflect its increasing responsibilities?

Kats and I thought of "AsyncInputController" at the Paris work week. Chris Lord suggested "AsyncInputHandler".

Thoughts?

Comment 1

[Chris Lord [:cwiiis]]

Just to add some rationale for my alternate suggestion; AsyncPanZoomController makes sense because it controls panning and zooming asynchronously. AsyncInputController suggests it controls input, but it's input that drives what it does, so I think Handler makes more sense.

I'm ok with either name though. Perhaps it could actually be split into AsyncInputHandler and AsyncPanZoomController, if we want more granularity?

Comment 2

[Botond Ballo [:botond]]

Let's keep in mind that we also have an APZCTreeManager class. If we rename AsyncPanZoomController to something else, we will probably want to rename APZCTreeManager as well. Will we name it <ABC>TreeManager where <ABC> is the acronym for the new name of AsyncPanZoomController? Or should we take this opportunity to reduce the level of acronym nesting? :)

Comment 3

[Botond Ballo [:botond]]

(In reply to Chris Lord [:cwiiis] from comment #1)
> Just to add some rationale for my alternate suggestion;
> AsyncPanZoomController makes sense because it controls panning and zooming
> asynchronously. AsyncInputController suggests it controls input, but it's
> input that drives what it does, so I think Handler makes more sense.

I agree that "input" and "controller" don't go well together here. Not sure how I feel about "handler", though. Maybe AsyncInputManager?

Comment 4

[Botond Ballo [:botond]]

Also, I'd like to have a name for the module/component of code that contains APZC and APZCTM and related code. I've been calling it "APZ", for "Async Pan/Zoom module" (see https://wiki.mozilla.org/Platform/GFX/APZ). We should also give that a new name.

Comment 5

[Chris Lord [:cwiiis]]

AsyncEventManager, perhaps? Maybe that's too generic, but I could imagine we'd want to handle other, non-input events too (sensors, for example... I guess it's still input, but certainly more passive than the word 'input' implies) - that would be a reasonable name for the module too.

For the tree manager, perhaps AsyncInputLayerManager? Not sure that's really any better though tbh...

Comment 6

[Kartikaya Gupta (email:[e-mail])]

I don't know if this is a good idea any more. Names are pretty hard to change this late in the game as we have a lot of documentation and mindshare using the current name. The cost/benefit ratio just doesn't seem worth it.

I would rather take an approach that completely guts the AsyncPanZoomController class into a bunch of smaller classes. I've been trying to take this approach when adding new classes (InputBlockQueue, TouchBlockState, etc.) but I think it would be worth while to extract existing code from APZC to do this as well.