#+TITLE: Architecture

This is my first project using rust and GTK, in order to improve my skill in it, I decide to record the Architecture and the idea.

* Idea
I wanted to build a launcher years ago, which including everything I need, such as
- applications
- windows switcher
- dictionary
- calculator
- clipboard manager
- password-store support
- screen recording tool support

  and the meantime, this tool should also support previews, so the ui should look like this:
  #+begin_src
   +----------------------------------------------+
   |                  Input Bar                   |
   +------------+---------------------------------+
   |            |                                 |
   |            |                                 |
   |            |                                 |
   |  Side Bar  |                                 |
   |            |                                 |
   |  Item 1    |                                 |
   |  Item 2    |                                 |
   |  Item 3    |        Preview Window           |
   |  ...       |                                 |
   |  ...       |                                 |
   |  ...       |                                 |
   |            |                                 |
   |            |                                 |
   |            |                                 |
   +------------+---------------------------------+
  #+end_src

At first, I spent some time on selecting the framework.

The inputbar should accept all unicodes, which need more efforts in iced or other pure rust framework now, so I   ruled out those options. I didn't find a mature binding for QT in rust, and to be honest, I didn't like QT.

The side bar is a list container which could hold thousauds of item, the better choice is to use a list view widget which could hold endless items.

The preview is a widget which could handle text, picture, web page and many more complex formats.

Thus I finally chose GTK4 as my ui framework. At the beginning, I wanted to implement all features in gtk, including the frontend and backend(This is a work edition now), but I found gtk is not that perfect in all conditions, and some problems is still here, the developers didn't want to listen to users, but gtk is a good solution for frontend framework now, so maybe I should only hand over ui to gtk to implement.

Let us implement it.

* Architecture
#+begin_src plantuml :file ./arch.png
@startuml
box Gtk Main Thread
participant "Input Bar" as input
participant "Sidebar" as sidebar
participant "Preview" as prev
end box

box Result Handler Thread
participant "Result Handler" as rht
end box

box Plugin Dispatcher Thread
participant "Plugin Dispatcher" as pdt
end box

box Plugin Task Thread Pool
participant "Plugin Task Pool" as pdp
end box

input -> rht: Send __User Input__
rht -> pdt
pdt -> pdp: Submit task
pdt -> pdp: Stop Task
pdp -> rht: Send back result(check user input)


rht -> sidebar: splice update result
sidebar -> rht: send current selection

sidebar -> prev: update preview

@enduml
#+end_src

#+RESULTS:
[[file:./arch.png]]