Bachelor Thesis - Computer Graphics Group

Chapter 5
Main application
5.1 Application design
The application has a modular, object oriented design taking advantage of
class inheritance and virtual methods. More advanced C++ features, such as
templates, exceptions and smart pointers have been used to increase productivity
and reliability. We also tried to exploit the potential of the Qt toolkit as
much as possible by taking advantage of the modules and features it provides.
These include QPointer, QObject, signals and slots, custom events, multithreading,
XML, etc. However, there were many cases where the platform
dependent Windows API had to be used to achieve things not possible in Qt.
This is mainly due to the nature of the application. We have to control other
applications and deal with the operating system.
The application implementation is divided into separate more or less independent
classes. The majority of the code belongs to class methods. Only small
helper routines used all over the application are standard functions. By their
nature, classes can be separated into four distinct groups:
• core logic
• helper classes
• user interface
• command implementations
Application configuration is based on Extensible Markup Language (XML)
[12] in order to be modular. It proved to be beneficial during the development,
when the user interface has not yet been implemented. As the format is user
readable, the configuration could be easily modified using a simple text editor
29