AN ARCHITECTURE FOR A STRICT MODEL-VIEW SEPARATION IN JAVA
Egbert Althammer · 2001
. Though the separation of a model from its visual representation (view) implies well-known benefits, available Java libraries as Swing so far do not sufficiently support this concept. The paper presents a straightforward way of how to smoothly enhance Java libraries in this direction, independent of the particular graphic user interface (GUI) library: The lean framework JGadgets, which was inspired by the Oberon Gadgets system [1], allows developers to focus on model programming only. This significantly reduces the development costs, in particular in the realm of quite simple, form-based GUIs which are common-place in commercial client-/serversystems. We first present a small case study implemented on top of JGadgets which demonstrates the benefits of a strict model/view separation. The paper goes on to sketch the reflection-based design of JGadgets itself.