Subject: Re: [Bitcoin-development] Suggestion for Simplifying development work

From: Wladimir <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 15 Jun 2012 17:59:02 +0200

On Fri, Jun 15, 2012 at 4:59 PM, Peter Vessenes <[email-masked]> 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