Philosophy and Design Concepts

dantro aims to be a rather general package, trying to not impose restrictions on: * types of data to work with, * the ways to load that data, * the ways to process data, * or the ways to plot data.

A common approach is to just use the package to strictly define a common interface and outsource all specializations to the projects that need to use it. However, this can result in needing to write (and re-write!) a lot of code outside of this package, which can become hard to maintain.

In order to avoid this, dantro not only supplies an interface, but also provides classes that can be easily customized to fit the needs of a certain use case.

Enter: Mixin Classes.

This refers to the idea that functionality can be added to classes using multiple inheritance.

For example, if a :py:class`~dantro.data_mngr.DataManager` is desired that needs a certain load functionality, this is specified simply by additionally inheriting a certain mixin class:

This concept is widely used in dantro; namely by containers, groups, data_loaders and even plot_creators.