Niels and I held a JChemPaint hack-a-thon today (the IRC log). We had a quite ambitious agenda:

  • make the renderer modular
  • make the controller modular
  • make a controller interface with Swing + SWT implementations

All this to make the JChemPaint editor module of the CDK more easily integrate with non-Swing widget environments. We achieved to make about 50% of these goals: the controller is now modular, and the Controller2DHub (soon going to deprecate the old Controller2D) no longer receives Swing mouse events, but local events by implementing the new IMouseEventRelay interface.

Controller modules implement the new IController2DModule interface. This modularization allows a clean up of CDK source code, making it more readable and easier to maintain. This was attempted in the past by setting up an AbstractController2D and a SimpleController2D. The new approach, however, allows to make separate modules for each rendering mode, which are independent anyway. The old code still needs to be ported to the new architecture, and this is expected to happen in the next two weeks.

Another clean up in the architecture is that the controller modules no longer directly act on the IChemModel, but use a new (badly named) IChemModelRelay interface, making the architecture more closely adhere to the MVC concept. The IChemModelRelay API currently contains only two methods, but this is expected to expend considerably, because all current JChemPaint edit actions will have to be passed via this interface.

If you want to give the new architecture a test run, look for the TestEditor application. At the time of writing, it uses a demo module, the DumpClosestObjectToSTDOUTModule, which dumps the nearest IAtom to STDOUT.

This post was originally posted as https://chem-bla-ics.blogspot.com/2007/09/jchempaint-hack-thon.html.