Monday, October 26, 2009

GUI Controller Design

The introduction of graphical user interfaces, or GUIs, have made a huge impact on the way humans interact with computer software. The command line, or terminal, interface is intimidating to many people. You can't exactly do anything intuitively with the command line unless you have several years experience using it. With the GUI, widgets, the components that make up the screen that is displayed to the user, are designed in such a way that they users can infer how to interact with them. For instance, with a button widget in a GUI, it is more often than not, obvious that the button should be clicked. In addition to the actions that the user must take in order to interact with the interface, the GUI allows for descriptive text to be easily placed. This helps the user determine why this button should be clicked instead of that one.

On the development side of things, there is no shortage today of GUI libraries available for use. Most of these libraries are available free of charge as open source software. Also very popular these days is the web browser as an application GUI platform. This is simply because most machines have a web browser capable of rendering HTML. It makes sense to take this approach to reach the widest audience possible.

The GUI library of choice, be it Qt or the web browser, is just one layer in the GUI design structure. In fact, it is the lowest level. Beyond the GUI library layer, that is a lower level still, are all aspects that the application developer doesn't want to deal with. What about the opposite direction in the logical layout of the GUI design structure? The next layer up could potentially be the application controlling layer itself. In many applications, this is in fact how components are layered. But this may not always be ideal. It can be beneficial for design purposes to implement a facade type abstraction in between the application logic and the various GUI widgets that make up application GUI. Illustrated below are potential layers that might be used to tie the GUI to the application itself.



Here, the outermost layer are the App Controllers. This is the heart of the application logic. It is the brain of the program that lives here. Next, we have GUI Controllers. This is another abstraction created by developers for interacting with the GUI library. Finally, at the lowest layer sits the GUI Lib. With this layout, the application logic never interacts directly with the GUI library which is an ideal design trait. GUI controllers created by the developers of the application offer more flexibility in almost every way imaginable.

Firstly, the application logic doesn't need to concern itself with assembling the GUI. Chances are that a given GUI library isn't going to provide the screens that you want to display to your users. They do, however, provide all widgets required to make for a consistent look and feel in the GUI. It is the responsibility of the GUI controlling layer to assemble these GUI widgets in a coherent manor. Again, the application logic only needs to know that it needs to display something to the user. It asks the GUI controlling layer to carry out this task faithfully. There is also the potential for technology independence. If the application controlling layer is interacting directly with the GUI library, modifying the application to support another GUI library is going to be nearly impossible. If, however, this is the responsibility of the GUI controlling layer, this suddenly becomes feasible. Not only does this help with technological independence, but also with platform portability. Chances are that subtle differences in how the widgets are created and displayed will be necessary across platforms. This should be done by the GUI controlling layer and not the application layer as it should function as-is on any platform.

Illustrated below is an application controller and a GUI controller interacting. The idea here is to show that the application controllers do not interact directly with the GUI library. In addition, the application controller servers as a communication channel to other lower layers. For instance, here, the page widget data is retrieved from the database by the application controller. The application controller then sends a message to the GUI controller to construct a GUI component. It sends data retrieved from the database as part of the message.

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