[Bf-taskforce25] data api proposal

[Brecht Van Lommel]

Hi,

I've made a proposal on a Blender Data API design:

http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/BlenderDev/Blender2.5/DataAPI

I think this is an important thing to get working fairly soon, because
it would be good for other 2.5 code to have this ready: operators need
properties, notifiers will need to be introduced and a lot of that would
be in the data API code, plus UI code would use it to replace a long
list of uiDefBut parameters. So rather than rewriting that code after
porting it to 2.5 it would be good to have it use the data API already.

Mostly I tried to get a clear picture of the different required data
types, required information about properties and integration. For each
section I've added some issues that are unsure/problematic.

The second part has some prototype code on how I think these structs and
properties should be defined in practice. This is however fairly
different from the existing initial implementations by Joshua and
Campbell which were written in python and based on parsing DNA header
files. Personally I prefer not to use python but it would be good to
hear arguments for and against it.

What is most obviously missing from the proposal is IPO's, duplis and
proxies. I have ideas on how to approach this, but need to think it over
further, will write more on that later.

So, if you have comments on the proposal, see things I forgot about,
have ideas about the issues mentioned in the proposal, ideas on how it
should be implemented, let's discuss them :).

Cheers,
Brecht.