A ForumFactory provides access to and management of Forums. It is the point of entry for the entire system.
A concrete instance of ForumFactory can be obtained by calling the getInstance() method with an Authorization token. The Authorization token determines with what permissions the rest of the objects in the system will be accessed with.
Usually the first steps of any program interacting with the system are:
- Obtain an authorization token by calling AuthorizationFactory.getInstance().getAuthorization(username, password);
- Use that authorization to get a ForumFactory instance.
- Use the forum factory to access forums and other content.
It is also possible to access content with anonymous permissions. See the AuthorizationFactory class for more information.
ForumFactory is an abstract class so that the actual implementation is pluggable. For example, the default implementation uses a database backend. You can optionally plug in your own backend that might use the filesystem, for example. When first creating the forum factory, will look for the property "ForumFactory.className". If it fails to find that property, it will use the default class.
@see AuthorizationFactory