Developing multiple user interfaces for an application

Question

I want to develop an application which has a graphical user interface that could be developed by using different widget toolkits. For example I want to use Qt, GTK+ or even ncurses as a building block for my user interface for the same application. Moreover users could choose which GUI implementation will be used during the next startup of the application without recompiling it first. I wonder what are possible design strategies and design patterns used in the implementation of this design?

Answer 1

The classic design pattern for multiple GUIs is MVC.

You have one model (application data and rules), the controllers (one per view) - these control UI interactions and mediate between the UI (views) and the model.

You can have different views talk to the controllers - one view can be Qt, another GTK+ or even a console application.