Re: [Rails-devel] Splash Screen

[Frederick W. <fre...@go...>]

Stefan:

> However are you sure that the the thread separation cannot create issues?

It's indeed quite a challenge to ensure that concurrent threads work
as expected under various situations. Therefore, when implementing the
splash screen, I refrained from any optimizations that were not
clearly without risks. The key is the following thread dependency:

- The splash thread (ProgressVisualizer inner class) will never cause
any issue as it is only considering the splash screen visualization of
what it has been notified.

- The init thread (non-EDT) creates/inits the classes (frames/panels).
Following swing's "realization" thread rule by the letter, I've put
any post-realization create/init logic (most often: pack()) of these
classes into an invokeLater. The same applies when finalizing the
initialization. There, the init Thread completely pauses until EDT is
through and issues setVisible / toFront within the EDT afterwards
(this is all done by invokeAndWait).

So as a result, the dependencies between init thread and EDT are drawn
very clearly and, by design, are very robust.

What I cannot exclude for 100% is that there is still some UI
component code (in some ? extends JFrame) that tries to access other
components when being run in the init thread. But I reduced the
likelihood of that being reviewing the existing code that is called
(transitively) during initialization.

So for the null pointer exception, please provide me the call stack
and I would follow up with an analysis.

My proposal for the splash screen would have been to include it into
1.7.0 and, if there are really reported issues, make it work for
1.7.x. I hope you understand I won't invest into reducing the scope of
this functionality, as it works fine for me and I would have been
willing to follow up on analyzing reported issues.

But it would also be a very valid option to exclude the functionality
from 1.7.0 (meaning forking 1.7.0 from before the splash screen
commits) and making more experiences with this for the weeks until
1.8.0.

My personal opinion is that for any feature I have developed in the
last months bugs could still be reported when releasing, the
probability for this to happen being only somewhat higher for the
docking framework and the game init refactoring.

So it's on you or the rest of rails-devel to decide...

-- Frederick