Front-End Update

After a solid day of work and nearly killing everyone around me… i have the GUI working the same as it was two days ago however…. All the panels are now in sperate classes with the main GUI class simply creating blank panels and filling these panels from the other classes. It is now alot easier to develop and add new panels as you go. This has also made it alot easier to see what is going on at any given time in the program.

The main problems i had here where first of all recreating the GUI from scratch and with the amount of functionality already contained within, this was an immense task. My main problem was that each different panel class would need to have access to the same instance of some variables. This was solved by creating a class which would contain all variables needed and act as a variable controller. So each time one of these variables are needed, an instance would be created in one of the classes and then updated when any changes have taken place. this would be the same for all classes and so the same data would be constintly updated.

One of the best things about this redesign is that we can now work on seperate panels and when it comes time to incorporate into the main GUI we can just send the panel to eachother and simply set and empty panel equal to it. This makes development and integration extremmly simple.

Ok its time to sleep, hopefully will get some more done tomorrow, i need to do a validity check on the buttons again and the effects.

~ by conormullen on March 4, 2008.