Developing GUI Applications: Architectural Patterns Revisited A Survey on MVC, HMVC, and PAC Patterns Alexandros Karagkasidis
[email protected] Abstract. Developing large and complex GUI applications is a rather difficult task. Developers have to address various common soFtware engineering problems and GUI-speciFic issues. To help the developers, a number of patterns have been proposed by the software community. At the architecture and higher design level, the Model-View-Controller (with its variants) and the Presentation-Abstraction- Control are two well-known patterns, which specify the structure oF a GUI application. However, when applying these patterns in practice, problems arise, which are mostly addressed to an insuFFicient extent in the existing literature (iF at all). So, the developers have to find their own solutions. In this paper, we revisit the Model-View-Controller, Hierarchical Model-View- Controller, and Presentation-Abstraction-Control patterns. We first set up a general context in which these patterns are applied. We then identiFy Four typical problems that usually arise when developing GUI applications and discuss how they can be addressed by each of the patterns, based on our own experience and investigation oF the available literature. We hope that this paper will help GUI developers to address the identified issues, when applying these patterns. 1 Introduction Developing a large and complex graphical user interface (GUI) application for displaying, working with, and managing complex business data and processes is a rather difficult task. A common problem is tackling system complexity. For instance, one could really get lost in large number of visual components comprising the GUI, not to mention the need to handle user input or track all the relationships between the GUI and the business logic components.