Thread: [Logicmail-devel] Progress report - 2011-07-15

SourceForge Headquarters 225 Broadway Suite 1600 San Diego, CA 92101 +1 (858) 454-5900

This progress report is probably not something I want to make a big blog 
post about so far, but anyone working with the code should probably know 
about it.

As some of you may know, I'll be giving a presentation at the BlackBerry 
Developer's Conference in San Francisco in October.  For my actual 
presentation, RIM finally finished giving me the necessary resources and 
deadlines this evening.  Of course they don't like to actually give you 
a deadline until its right around the corner.  Right now, I need to have 
my draft submitted by July 22nd and the final presentation by August 
12th.  (If they extend it, they'll wait until I've already rushed to 
meet the current deadline.)  So, I plan to be dedicating almost all of 
my spare time (that would otherwise go to LogicMail) to this over the 
next week or two.

Okay, I think the more important thing for everyone to know is what I've 
done since that last big blog post from last weekend.  I just committed 
code to give the application the ability to auto-start on device boot, 
and to prevent it from always wanting to exit when the user closes the 
app's home screen.

The auto-start feature itself is a configuration option, and disabled by 
default (like all the nice 2.1 features, until we fully test them and 
integrate them into the setup wizard).  The home screen close action now 
simply backgrounds the app.  The "exit" option on the menu will still 
cause the app to quit.

At a code-level, here's what I did:
I completely refactored the code in LogicMail.java (the main class of 
the application), which handles app startup, to make it far more 
readable.  I then added a new singleton container object 
(LogicMailRuntimeState) to manage all application state that is kept 
within the runtime store.  (It was previously just a hashtable of 
notification sources.)

The application's autostart entry point previously just fixed icons, 
registered notification sources, and exited.  Now, if auto-start is 
configured by the user, it doesn't exit.  Instead, it will completely 
start the application in the background, and put a reference to the 
UiApplication instance in the runtime store container I mentioned above.

The application's normal entry point now acts a little differently as 
well.  It first checks the runtime store container for an existing 
instance, and simply foregrounds it if one exists.  If one does not 
exist, then it starts the application just like it always used to do.

In implementing this, there was one problem of note that I had to work 
around:
The autostart entry point executes before all the device's filesystems 
(e.g. SDCard) are mounted.  I had to fix some issues so that LogicMail 
could handle this case.  (Filesystems are only used for local folders 
and message content cache, so the app can work fine without them.  I 
also already handled filesystems disappearing/reappearing while the app 
was running, so a lot of the work for this was already done.)

(I also discovered an ordering-related bug with folder cache loading, 
that didn't manifest under any conditions but auto-start folder refresh, 
check the commit log for details.)

Okay, so where are we now?
I still need to make sure all of this works on a real device.  I also 
still need to test behavior during desktop manager synchronization, 
since I now need to expect the app to actually be running during this as 
a more common use case.

I hope that all made sense :-)

-- 
----------------------------
  Derek Konigsberg
  dko...@lo...
----------------------------

Thread: [Logicmail-devel] Progress report - 2011-07-15

logicmail-devel