Professional Java User Interfaces

Chapter 7. Code Organization

This chapter discusses the main trade-offs and issues related to the organization of code and other implementation artifacts for application GUIs. Experimental or unproven approaches, or solutions that don't fit within existing Java GUI technologies, are not considered. The client tier – that is, the portion of software that is deployed on a client machine – is the principal focus. The chapter includes some implementation details for an example layering scheme. It focuses on J2SE/J2EE, but the design strategies discussed here can be applied to J2ME applets, as shown in Chapter 10, as long J2ME's resource constraints are observed.

The chapter is structured as follow:

7.1, Introducing software architectures discusses some general issues of software architectures and related software design strategies for GUI applications.

7.2, Some common GUI architectures introduces some of the most useful software architectures for GUIs.

7.3, A three-layer organization for GUI code goes into the details and the trade-offs of the layering scheme.

7.4, Two examples of a three-layer implementation shows examples of the application of the layering scheme, one to a simple project and one to a large one.

7.5, The service layer describes the details of the proposed implementation of the service layer for the three-layer architecture.

Introducing software architectures

Layering is a well-known technique for reducing dependencies between parts of a software system. An element in a particular ...