Document-View-Presentation Pattern

TL;DR: The DVP pattern builds on the Document-View pattern and strongly decouples the rendering function from the output of the rendering result, which makes it possible to render the data once and output the result in different methods repeatedly.

Abstract: When designing the architecture of an interactive system, the challenge is to keep the data model and the functional core that manipulates the data independent of the user interface. However, we usually categorize the rendering function, which translates the data into the form suitable for visual purposes, as the output part of the user interface. In other words, the rendering process of the data and the way to output the rendering result are tightly coupled. This limitation results in the need to render the data once for each user interface whenever the data changes, even in the case that multiple user interfaces share the same rendering result. In this paper, we describe the Document-View-Presentation (DVP) pattern for interactive software systems. This pattern builds on the Document-View pattern and strongly decouples the rendering function from the output of the rendering result. This separation makes it possible to render the data once and output the result in different methods repeatedly. This architecture is especially suitable to those interactive systems with computationally expensive rendering algorithms, such as graphics or image processing systems. Moreover, the DVP pattern also introduces the 3-tier concept into the design of an interactive system to have “thin” clients, i.e. user interfaces. Such a thin user interface could be distributed to another process or even another machine without a major impact on the system. This capability possibly allows an interactive system to become a Web-based application without much effort.