[Java-gnome-developer] Doing the right thing

[Andrew C. <an...@op...>]

Hey,

So I've been rewriting my little geode [1] archive-to-usbkey script in
java-gnome, largely as an exercise in doing something actually useful
before I proceed with [risking] using java-gnome in a bigger project.

Mostly, this isn't a GUI event driven thing - it's just a bog standard
program that happens to want to display its progress in a nice GUI
window. That, however, means a worker thread, and then trying to cause
things to happen in the GUI instance.

My question is this: have I done this code right? I'm asking now, before
I get too much further down the track. I've done all the bits of this
individually in the past (duh), but I'm worried that in combining them
I've made some fatal assumption to do with GTK, or how java-gnome wraps
it, or....

It does seem to work fine, although I had to play around quite a bit
before I got the the worker thread and the [implicit] main thread to
co-operate nicely together. Mark pointed out to me that I needed to use
"CustomEvents" to fire any  the Gtk.main loop. I'm *not* doing that and
everything seems to work (although I did fire a CustomEvent to ensure
that the main loop had a chance to run).

So is this horrible code, or will it do as a skeleton to proceed from?
I'm not talking about things like "oh there's a package class in your
file that should be in a separate file" but rather whether or not I've
gone about things the right way. [It's my hope that this is good enough
that it can eventually become a good quality, "easy to understand"
reference example for people new to java-gnome to look at after the
examples]

I've attached the main .java file if you want to have a peek. If you're
actually inclined to want to build it (cool!), you can get it by:

  tla register-archive http://research.operationaldynamics.com/arch/hacks/
  tla get an...@op...--hacks/geode--trunk--0.3 geode
  cd geode

And then either 

  make java

to compile the classes and run it in a standard JVM, or

  make native

to build it with GCJ and run the resultant executable. You'll have to
change the Makefile as it assumes your bleeding edge gnome libraries are
in /opt/gnome2 . [No, there's no configure or any of that nonsense yet].

[For those struggling with getting gcj to work right, the native section
of the Makefile may be of interest to you - I've been using GCJ quite
successfully with java-gnome for some time now]

As I said, it's just a skeleton at this point. It works (!), but I
really would welcome any suggestions, help, abuse, or advice before I
slog on further.

Thanks!

AfC
Sydney



[1] Presently, geode is a bash scrip from hell, but if nothing else it's
a good practical application of zenity. I use it every day. See
http://www.operationaldynamics.com/reference/software/scripts/#geode

-- 
Andrew Frederick Cowie

OPERATIONAL DYNAMICS
Operations Consultants and Infrastructure Engineers

http://www.operationaldynamics.com/