Re: [OT] Best way to isolate a GUI? (The final concensous?)

["Marin David Condic" <mcondic.auntie.spam@acm.org>]

I understand your concerns - especially about returning data and potential
indeterminism. A lot of that is why messaging systems get limited to a
command/response protocol - so that you do have returned data and you force
some serialization into the process. Some messaging systems include things
like heartbeat counters or other numbering schemes to try to insure that
things line up nicely and that failures are handled, specifically to try to
get away from the problems you cite.

Ultimately, it comes down to this: You want to design something, you'll have
to pick some philosophy or approach. Having done that, you just eliminated
all the other possible approaches. That means you'll always be able to stand
there looking at the design you *did* pick and cast stones at it because it
doesn't have the strengths of some other approach. If you do that enough,
you never accomplish anything. So you try to pick the dog with the least
number of fleas.

In my little imaginary world of dreaming up a way to separate the GUI from
the app, I tend to like a messaging scheme because it is loosely coupled and
flexible enough that it could probably be mated to a number of GUIs and GUI
builders as well as staying language neutral. I think if one went another
route - that involving callbacks - one would likely lose the flexibility and
find it difficult to make it line up with more than one GUI at a time. While
callbacks are going to have certain advantages (forcing a certain amount of
command/response protocol and returning results to the GUI) I think that
careful design of a messaging system might be able to live without those
advantages or synthesize them in some other way. So you pays your money and
you takes your pick. :-)

MDC
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Marin David Condic
I work for: http://www.belcan.com/
My project is: http://www.jsf.mil/

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    "Going cold turkey isn't as delicious as it sounds."
        -- H. Simpson
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Warren W. Gay VE3WWG <ve3wwg@cogeco.ca> wrote in message
news:3E5A5F1C.9040907@cogeco.ca...
> Unfortunately I have to be a bit brief in this reply (shortened
> lunch today ;-)
>