Image preloading

[Deskblue Software - Javier Sánchez <jsanchez deskblue com>]

Hi guys!

This weekend, I'm studing how to solve the next bug in my list:

Bug 321603 - preload prev and next files.

After reading the code of EogThumbNav, EogThumbView, and EogListStore I
think that is good time to refact this "component" of our image viewer.
This classes models what looks like a MVC pattern. EogListStore acts as
model, EogThumbNav and EogThumbView act as view and finally EogWindow
acts as controller. But you can see that the business logic for image
navigation (first, next, previous, last, ...) which I think it would be
in model (remember EogListStore) it being in view (remember
EogThumbView).

For reasons like that, my proposal is to refact the navigator component
of the viewer. We can implement it as a "real" MCV pattern where model
contains the business logic, where view is the graphical representation
of the model and finally where controller maps view inputs as calls of
model API.

This way the model API can contain public methods for image navigation
(first, next, previous, last, ...) private methods for image preloading
(which is the target of this bug) signals to notify that the active
image has been changed and everything we want to add.

I started to make a simply prototype of that, but as you can imaging
it's a big deal and I will not lose my time. For this reason I would
like to know what do you think about my idea. Continuing for this path?
Have you other any ideas to implement this enhancement? 

Thanks.

Javier Sánchez.