On Fri, Jun 15, 2012 at 4:59 PM, Peter Vessenes <peter@coinlab.com> wrote:

Hi all,

I've been wondering about whether it would be possible to wipe out the GUI completely from the satoshi client, and reimplement any necessary data requests as RPC calls, allowing us to fork -QT and other GUIs over and (hopefully) dramatically simplifying the codebase that you all have to work on.

Splitting the UI into a seperate *process* is a long-term goal. The UI code is structured so that all communication with the core happens through a "bottleneck" (consisting of the model classes), so preparation has been under way.

However, the current RPC calls don't suffice to implement a full-featured, responsive UI. I'm not even sure JSON-RPC is a good fit for a UI<->core protocol, as it doesn't support bidirectional communication (at least without pretty ugly hacks).

But what exactly is the problem with having a GUI as part of the main client project? I don't see how it would "speed up development" to split the project. By far most of the users use the program through the UI so it is one of the drivers for requirements on the core, and I'd think it is pretty important to keep it a first-class citizen.

Wladimir