Finding Danilatos helpful Supporting tagline
I’d watched the IO videos long ago: Ray Ryan, two years in a row, heralding the benefits of Google’s MVP. I’d used Microsofts MVC and saw that MVP was simpler, so I used MVP. I’d previously just been using a two-class system loosely based on what Qt forced you to do, and so I switched to a three class based system with a simple class as the model (what Java would call a POJO) and a View class that was the only class in the trio exposed to GUI classes (and UIBinder as such).
But I still really didn’t get MVC.
MVC’s main advertised benefit comes from testing.
After listening to Danilatos talk carefully
I’d just written a test of my CommandLinePresenter which has a very simple view (a single Label) and a very simple model (a few strings that make up that label) and now it was time to test the InventoryPresenter.
For my CommandLinePresenter, my testing code looked something like: mouseMove(x,y) mouseClick(x,y) at which point, the test would recieve a call on a methd of an interface it had implemented, and it asserted this data in it’s test.
For the next class, the InventoryPresenter, I was hoping to do the same. But then I started thinking that maybe I should put similar methods on my View, because it’s a gui class. Then I thoguht maybe I should change the way I’m testing these classes? But then the MVC dogma kicked in: and I was left with no doubt that the best way to test was to make the view “correct by construction” - it’s not being tested, so don’t put anything in there: it’s got to go in to the InventoryPresenter.
I realised that this has larger implications on the dependency injected views I’d implemented last month. When I did that piece of refactoring, I’d added some little differences in the way the views are implemented on each system. But I realised at this point, that, if I am to share the same Presenter code for each system, then the views on each system are going to have to be pretty much identical. And if they need to differ in a large way, then not only would I have methods to create the views in my Factory interface, I would also need methods to create presenters. Hence the need for Dependency Injection frameworks, where the entire tree of classes is specified through annotations and such.
blog comments powered by Disqus