An event-driven model-view-controller framework for Smalltalk

Abstract

The Smalltalk Model-View-Controller (MVC) user interface paradigm uses polling for its input control. The polling loops consume CPU cycles even when the user is not interacting with the interface. Applications using Smalltalk as their front-end often suffer unnecessary performance loss. This paper presents a prototype event-driven MVC framework to solve these problems. A solution to the compatibility problem is also provided to allow interface objects built under both polling and event-driven mechanisms to be used by each other with no modification and no performance penalty,

Improving Modularity of Interactive Software with the MDPC Architecture

“…However, the Vzm component is still in charge of determining which zone has been hit, hence it is not invariant to changes of relative layout of parts. Similarly, in the Event-driven MVC [20], the code that handles picking is buried into the view, and hence precludes any simple change of layout. MDPC clearly factors out this task from the Controller and the View, which leads to more reusable code.…”