In the past, manual notification mechanisms were the de facto standards for updating dependent data in an object-oriented application. Patterns such as Observer, Publish-Subscribe, Document-View, and Model-View-Controller were certainly important as graphical user interfaces (GUIs) matured. But now that interactive applications have grown more sophisticated, expressive, and complex, the chore of notification now burdens productivity.
In this series of articles, I have introduced a mechanism that removes manual labor from dependency tracking. This mechanism automatically discovers dependencies within the application and ensures that dependent information is always up to date.
Read the whole series on automatic dependency tracking:
- Part 1: Design an information model for automatically discovering dependencies in interactive object-oriented applications
- Part 2: Automatic dependency tracking discovers dependencies at runtime and updates the user interface
- Part 3: Create a rich, interactive experience for your user
Along the way, I developed Nebula, a network design application that demonstrates a typical GUI application’s many key features. It models a …