Code Refactoring

We have identified a major refactoring of the SasView code as a priority for the next major release. The refactoring effort has the following goals:

• Improve the maintainability of the code.
• Cleanly separate the computation and the UI components to allow
  • easily replacing the UI if/when new technologies become available or when the current one becomes obsolete/unsupported
  • remote submission (necessary to eventually allow use of clusters or HPC backends).

The following approach is thought to be the most practical given the level of effort involved and the resources available.

Suggested Approach (Medium-Term Goals)

• Follow a progressive refactoring approach rather than a complete re-write.
• Keep the UI in wx for this first phase.
• Proceed by identifying use-cases that are known to involve code that need refactoring. For each of those use-cases, identify the API needed to perform the calculations by script.
• Go through our use-cases and refactor the computation code to follow the new API. Refactor the UI to use the newly refactored code.
• Release a new version of SasView once this work is completed.

Long-Term Goals

• Building on the work described above, we will then consider moving to PyQt and/or building a web application version of SasView.
• The following version of SasView should be able to submit remote jobs to compute resources to be determined. Those will likely be located at labs, but could alternatively use services like Amazon AWS.