Wednesday 21 May 2008

PureMVC, and the MDI / TDI quandry.

CarnageBlood recommended I check out PureMVC as a framework, and I'm really grateful for the suggestion because it looks excellent.

I have no doubt that using PureMVC is a good move - it's opensource and we can develop any generically useful extensions as plug ins that will be useful to other PureMVC users.  

The big question I have is single-core or multi-core?  How do these relate to interface possibilities?

My favourite applications appear to be a hybrid of TDI and MDI.  Coda is an amazing one-window-web-development tool that has tabbed browsing of files open in each window - one window referring to a 'site'.  Having multiple windows open means I can entirely separate my work by project / client / server.  I love it.  Each window has its own interface - file browser, search tool, activity etc.  A couple of windows - such as 'clips' - a code snippets tool - are shared across the app as floating panels.

Omnigraffle 5 works in a very similar way. Lots of the interface is wrapped directly around the document, but formatting panels etc are floating shared windows.

I've done plenty of standard MVC development but never a multi-core app.  I'm not even sure that what I'm describing is truely multicore?  Whilst there would be many models, views and controllers, the actual basis of the application is perhaps still a single core?

More reading to be done - and possibly the best way forward is to plan version 1 as single window (apart from interface floaters) tabbed documents style, with the multiple project windows version as a major update.

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