Professional Java User Interfaces

Chapter 6. Implementation Issues

As we saw in the first part of the book, user interface design is not a matter of taste, or at least, shouldn't be. On the contrary, while the exterior appearance of a GUI should adhere to standard design guidelines, in practice the inner software design is more or less left to the developer's goodwill, with the tacit assumption that the implementation is okay as long as it works.

This chapter discusses some of key issues in the implementation of Java GUIs, such as how many closely-intertwined objects can communicate in a modular fashion, which criteria are traditionally followed for organizing the code of complex GUIs at design time, and how user interactions and the way the GUI reacts to them are represented and managed. General problems are introduced and the most effective solutions to those problems proposed. Such solutions usually imply adopting one or more OOP design pattern and other techniques^[58]. The chapter organization follows the functional decomposition of the general model introduced in Chapter 1. The chapter is structured as follows:

6.1, Revisiting the abstract model discusses various issues related to the implementation of GUIs and the abstract model presented in Chapter 1.

6.2, Content discusses common design solutions for implementing the content layer, such as content assembly and navigation.

6.3, Business domain illustrates the main issues related to representation of the business domain in GUIs.

6.4, Data input-output discusses ...