Release Cleanup: Day 3

I’ve still been on BrowserWindow refactoring today, working on some much more intense refactoring. Essentially the main thing I did was to extract out the common layout patterns into a HeaderBar subclass so I can write the BrowserWindow code a bit more declaratively. It’s not as concise as the psuedocode I shared yesterday as it wasn’t worth it (unlike before) to implement that syntax; it creates more effort then it saves.

The increased code clarity isn’t the only thing that came out of this effort, it has also helped me to:

• Move away from deprecated APIs like AppMenu
• And expose more functionality (e.g. reload ignoring cache) and more keyboard shortcuts.

The open and save actions further benefitted from abstracting the FileChooserDialog behind a new method, something akin to JavaScript’s alert/prompt/confirm APIs. Once I combined that wrapper method with a foreach loop, I found I could make cancel handling implicit in the code while being fully functional.

So while it took quite a bit of effort to perform this refactoring, it is well worth it both for developers and users of Odysseus. And certainly a lot nicer for me as a member of both groups.

Concerns Now Removed From BrowserWindow

• Persistance
• Tracking state of window-visible webview
• Direct construction of toolbar buttons & their menus.