[IGSTK-Developers] Observer/Observable pattern

[Ziv Yaniv]

Hi All,

The following question is with regard to ITK, but it spills over to
IGSTK, so I'm sending it to this development list as I'm not on the ITK
developers one.

I would like to understand the reasoning behind the design of the
ITK observer/observable pattern implementation. According to the
documentation of the AddObserver() method in itk::Object I cannot
have the same Observer attached to several objects, as observable
objects are responsible for the observer's memory. This is
reflected in the use of a raw pointer to a itk::Command object in
the itk::Object::AddObserver() method.

In the spirit of ITK I expected the AddObserver method to receive
a SmartPointer which also allows a single observer
attached to multiple objects, as the memory would be released
when the last observable deleted its observers.

Am I missing something? Should this go into a bug/feature request on
the ITK side?

             regards
                 Ziv