Trying to follow MVC - Seeking advice on a good design

Question

I just resumed work on an old project and have been thinking about rewriting some parts of it.

My question relates to how to structure my program. I have been trying to follow the MVC paradigm. I'll start by explaining where things stand: the program manipulates 4 types of images: Bias, Darks, Flat Fields and Lights. I have a class called Image that can represent all of these. The Bias and Dark are subtracted from the Light and then the Light is divided by the Flat Field. Initially, I was going to use 2 classes for this, one called CalibrationImage and the other just Light. But the difference was only of one method which would be the dividing function I mentioned above. Otherwise, they are the same. So I decided against having two classes for this purpose.

The 2nd major class in the program concerns handling multiple Image objects -- this class is known as ImageStacker. As of right now, it holds Image objects in a mutable array. It can do various operations on this array, like stack all the images, calibrate them etc.

This class also acts as the datasource for the NSTableView object in the main window. I'm not thinking that instead of having a single mutable array, I should have 4 arrays each holding its designated for a type of image (like, an array for Lights, another for Darks etc.). Once the program begins its actual work, it will Darks, Flat Fields and Bias frames. It will then calibrate each object held in the Lights array and then stack them. I feel like this provides the program with logical progression. Its also a bit easy to visualize.

Is this a good program design? Does it follow MVC? As I see it, my view is NSTableView, controller is NSApplication and Model is ImageStacker. But then, Image feels like its not part of the MVC but I cant see how to write the program without it.

Answer 1

My 2-cents: MVC is a presentation design pattern. I will typically write my MVC apps with separate business and data layers apart from MVC portion. It is ok that Image is not apart of the MVC pattern, it would probably better fit into a group of classes that you would define as your business layer. There are a lot of good books, blogs and articles out there that talk about programming design patters so I will not reiterate what they have already done. Simply asking this question is a good start. I would suggest you follow through by looking at content that is already available.