Sciter UI, application architecture

Architecture of applications that use Sciter based UI can be visualized as this:

Typically such applications contain two distinct layers:

• UI layer that uses Sciter window with loaded HTML/CSS and scripts (code behind UI);
• Application logic layer, most of the time that is native code implementing logic of the application.

Ideally these two layers shall be split appart – isolated from each other as they use conceptually different code models and probably code styles.

UI layer uses event driven model: "on click here expand section there and send request to logic layer for some data".

Application logic layer (ALL) is more linear usually. It is is a collection of functions that accepts some parameters and return some data. Even if ALL uses threads code inside such threads is still linear.

UI and app-logic interaction principles:

Most of the time code execution in UI applications is initiated by the UI itself but sometimes application code may generate its own events. For the UI such events are not anyhow different from pure UI events like mouse/keyboard clicks and the like. Informational flow between UI and ALL conceptually fall into these three groups:

1. "get-request" – synchronous calls from UI to logic layer to get some data:
2. "post-request" – asynchronous calls with callback "when-ready" functions:
3. "application events" – application detects some change and needs to notify UI to reflect it somehow:

To support all these scenarios application can use only two "entry points" :

• UI-to-logic calls: event_handler::on_script_call(name,args,retval)
• logic-to-UI calls:  sciter::host:call_function(name, args ) – calls scripting function from C/C++ code. The name here could be a path: "namespace.func".  

get-requests

To handle UI-to-logic calls the application defines sciter::event_handler and attaches its instance to the Sciter window (view). Its on_script_call method will be invoked each time when script executes code like this in scipt:

view.getSomeData(param1, param2);

that will end up in this C/C++ call:

event_handler::on_script_call(NULL,
         "getSomeData", 
         2 /*argc*/ , 
         argv[2], 
         SCITER_VALUE& retval /* return value */ );

Sciter SDK contains convenient macro wrapper/dispatcher for such on_script_call function:

  class window
    : public sciter::host<window>
    , public sciter::event_handler
  {
    HWND   _hwnd;
    ...
    
    json::value  debug(unsigned argc, const json::value* arg);      
    json::value  getSomeData(json::value param1, json::value param2);      

BEGIN_FUNCTION_MAP
  FUNCTION_V("debug", debug);  
  FUNCTION_2("getSomeData", getSomeData); 
END_FUNCTION_MAP
  }

Declaration FUNCTION_2("getSomeData", getSomeData); binds view.getSomeData() in script with native window::getSomeData call.  

Therefore functionality exposed to the UI layer by logic layer can be defined as a content of single BEGIN_FUNCTION_MAP/END_FUNCTION_MAP block.

If your application contains many modules that are connected dynamically then you can define single view.exec("path", params...) function that will do name/call dispatch using some other principles:

var newAccount = view.exec("accounts/new", initialBalance);
view.exec("accounts/delete", accountId);

view.exec("accounts/update", {customerName:"new name"} );

application events

Application can generate some events by itself. When some condition or state inside application changes it may want to notify the UI about it. To do that application code can simply call function in script namespace with needed parameters.

Let’s assume that script has following declaration:

namespace Accounts 
{
  function created( accountId, accountProps ) {
     $(#accountList).append(...);
  }
  function deleted( accountId, accountProps ) {
     $(#accountList li[accid={accountId}]).remove();
  }
}

Then the application code can fire such events by simply calling:

window* pw = ...
pw->call_function("Accounts.created", accId, accFields );
pw->call_function("Accounts.deleted", accId );

post-request

Need of post request arises when some of work need to be done inside worker threads. Some task either take too long to complete or data for them needs to be loaded from the Net or other remote sources. UI cannot be blocked for long time – it still shall be responsive. The same situation happens in Web applications when JavaScript needs to send AJAX request. In this case callback functions are used. Call to native code includes reference to script function that will be executed when the requested data is available.

Consider this UI script function that asks app-logic to create some account on a remote server:

function createAccount( accountProps ) 
  {
    function whenCreated( accountId ) // inner callback function
    { 
      $(#accountList).append(...);
    }
    view.exec("accounts/create", accountProps, whenCreated );
  }

It passes accountProps data and callback function reference to the "accounts/create" thread. This thread creates the account (presumably takes some time) and invokes whenCreated at the end.

class createAccount: worker_thread 
  {
    handle<window> ui;
    SCITER_VALUE props;
    SCITER_VALUE callback;

    void run()
    {  // the thread body
       // ... do some time consuming stuff ...

       SCITER_VALUE accountId = createAccount(props);

       // done, execute the callback in UI thread:
       ui->ui_exec([=]() {
         callback.call(accountId); 
       }); 
    }
}

Note about that ui_exec function above: the UI is single threaded by its nature – singly display device, single keyboard and mouse, etc. Worker threads shall not access the UI directly – the UI shall be updated from UI thread only. The ui_exec function does just that – executes block of code in UI thread. See C++0x: Running code in GUI thread from worker threads article about it.

Epilogue

Having just two "ports"  (out-bound UI-to-logic and in-bound logic-to-UI) is a good thing in principle. This allows to isolate effectively two different worlds – asynchronous UI and deterministic application logic world. Easily "debuggable" and manageable.

HTML, CSS and script (code behind UI) runs in most natural mode and application core is comfortable too – not tied with the UI and its event and threading model.