Sunday, December 20, 2009

Layered architecture for a Java application

This is a template for an application architecture that came out of my genome browser project. This Java/Swing desktop application aspires to be very flexible - implementing new visualizations and accommodating task-specific components when necessary. I'm not sure how well I did at this goal, so don't take this as here's-what-you-should-do, just here's-what-one-poor-schmuck-did.

The Application object holds application scope state, and binds components together, performing dependency injection where necessary. The entry point is myapp.Main, which configures Options using command-line arguments and starts the application. The application manages a concurrent event dispatch queue.

Components communicate with each other by events placed on the event queue and have access to an application API. Like in Swing, component code may run in the thread of the event dispatch, or, if it is long running, spin up its own thread. Components are responsible for managing their own threading and synchronization.

Layering, in this template, works something like this:

+--------+
|   UI   |
+--------+
+-----------------+ +----------------+
|   Application   | |   components   |
+-----------------+ +----------------+
+--------------+
|   services   |
+--------------+
+------------+ +----------+
|   domain   | |   util   |
+------------+ +----------+

Higher layers can depend on lower layers, while dependencies may not flow up. Utilities and domain model can have no internal dependencies and anything may depend on them. Services are things like file I/O, persistence, and maybe algorithms. The application exposes an API to components and will in turn implement that API in terms of components. I think this circular dependency doesn't bother me too much. If it did, the Application could have no dependencies on the components and the components could have some organized dependency structure among themselves. The UI sits on top where nothing should depend on it.

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