Tom, One very common and seemingly effective structure is the tree / scenegraph, which is used in Qt and, as the DOM, in HTML, and lots of other places. GoGi https://github.com/goki/gi uses this, so you can see native Go examples there. In Qt and GoGi in particular, you leverage the Layout to do a lot of the work — just add elements to it, and let it organize the appearance, etc. You can use the visitor and model / view patterns to operate on the scenegraph and keep the logic decoupled from the appearance..
GoGi makes extensive use of another efficient trick: separating the decisions about what gui elements to construct from the process of configuring those elements. There can be a lot of complex conditional logic in deciding what you want to build — tying this up with all the additional logic to create and manage those elements results in major spaghetti. To decouple these, a slice of type, name tuples is constructed dynamically via the relevant logic, and then after that point, everything is relatively clean and modular in switching etc on how to configure / manage whatever was ultimately built. See e.g., the https://github.com/goki/gi/blob/master/gi/dialogs.go code that has many different ways to configure the “config” slice for a dialog.. - Randy > On Jan 11, 2019, at 4:30 PM, Tom <hyper...@gmail.com> wrote: > > Hi! > > TL;DR: GUI applications seems pretty hard to structure the code in a readable > way. Can anyone recommend any patterns/layout or suggestions to structuring > such a codebase and keeping it readable? > > I wrote a GUI application in Go late at night once (using gotk3). I tried to > keep it readable by functionally decomposing methods, keeping as much private > as possible, and keeping different dialogs/windows etc in different packages > (each dialog/window was mapped to a struct). > > Despite this, each struct quickly turned into existential spaghetti, with > 10-20 fields on each struct and over a dozen methods, with quite high > coupling. > > I thought about trying to break down pieces into smaller components (like a > struct for a subset of fields on the page), but that seemed like more > boilerplate with still quite a bit of coupling. > > So my question is this: How do you structure Go GUI programs? What patterns > work? Anything well-written & open-source I can learn from? > > GUI programs seems particularly heinous compared to server or system > programs, which (at least to me) seem a lot easier to tease out parts & keep > them simple-looking. > > Thanks & love, > Tom > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "golang-nuts" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > email to golang-nuts+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "golang-nuts" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to golang-nuts+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
