108 Chapter 3 Application Design: A Real-Life Example
110 Chapter 3 Application Design: A Real-Life Example The main process, also responsible for the chat-output streaming, will keep state information updated in a database that all other interface components can access, retrieve, and display in a suitable fashion (see Figure 3.8). Outgoing network data via shared memory Incoming network data Main IRC process Interfacecomponents(nick list, etc.) User input via database via database via frameset HTML output to user Figure 3.8 The final application layout. Interface to the Developer An interface for developers? What does this have to do with chat? And how is it supposed to work? Typically, most applications suffer from the disability of being solid, meaning being either completely unmodifiable or difficult to modify by foreign developers. In terms of end-user-oriented software (for example, desktop environments such as Windows, KDE, MacOS, etc.), hardly anyone will ever find the ideal solution.Similar to a chat system,most people who download it say, Hey,great, but it lacks this and that, or Cool, but I don t like the way it does xyz. Without an easy, clearly exposed path for modification by anyone using it, most applications end up in the trash. Most people won t even try to work on a program they didn t develop themselves if the ease of doing so doesn t hit them right in the face. This means that for the chat application to consistently enforce independence of code and interface layout (allowing an interface to HTML developers) and to consistently enforce independence of data-processing steps, we need to create a solid application core (the part of the application that nobody should ever need to change) which interfaces to a distributed set of plug-ins (the part of the application that most people will want to change somehow). Think again about the importance of these enforcements.Would you like an application to be designed like this? Would you even need it? Think about how this could be realized.
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