On Sat, Feb 2, 2013 at 1:24 AM, Steve Simmons <square.st...@gmail.com> wrote: > At this point, I began to wonder what a 'correctly structured' OO program > should look like. Should I separate GUI logic from 'business' logic? Should > everything be in one class? Should my main() be carrying the high level > logic? Anyinput most welcome. > > I looked briefly at the MVC model which answers my question at a high level > but itrepresents another learning curve that I'm reluctant to add to my > current challenge.
Rule #0 of design: There's always a worse pattern you could have used. Python gives you all the flexibility you could want. And with that flexibility comes ease of complication. The key is to find the simplest design that will accomplish what you want, and go from there. The idea of separating out "business logic" from "user interface" seems all very well on the face of it, but it's often harder than you might think, and when you force an application into that kind of segregation, you'll often end up with thin layers around one or the other so there's really UI code interspersed with "guts" code despite your best efforts. Drastically changing your UI will generally involve lots of code changes anyway, so don't be too bothered if you find you need to change something that didn't feel like "user interface" code. Model/View/Controller systems tend, imho, to be massive overkill for anything smaller than Huge. In fact, I can't point to any MVC system that fitted onto a single computer that couldn't have been done better with something rather simpler. Above all, don't have one class for "someone else's code" and one for "my code" unless there's some really REALLY good reason for it. A better model in Python would be to have two *modules*, not two classes. But there are myriad ways you could lay out your code, and few of them are truly *wrong*. The most important thing to do is to think about what you do; plan, don't just let it grow by itself. The plan shouldn't be chiseled into basalt, but any time you change it, be sure you know why you're changing it. You say you're new to OO; what programming model(s) are you more familiar with? Python doesn't force you into object orientation - you can ignore it and just work with imperative code, if you prefer. All the best! ChrisA -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
