every time i code a gui (in my case with GWT, never touched gui programming before), i notice that my code becomes a big mess, when the applications becomes more complex.
It’s really frustrating to look over my code and get a headache of all these setters in object constructors and this messy throwing together of these.
I am using the MVC Pattern and it really helps to get a lot clearer. Unfortunately my whole view component isn’t clear at any point. 😉 I tried to use a lot of interfaces to abstract from the building process and to have just a few implemented interfaces which will be added together, (I thought i could switch between different libraries, like Gwt-Ext and Gxt, easily) but still i am not really happy.
I am sure you had this problems too, and i want to ask you what practice do you follow to get cleaner code? Are there design patterns for gui coding except MVC? What are your tricks for highly readable and beautiful user interface code?
Martin Fowler wrote interesting article on this topic: GUI Architectures