diff --git a/documentation/trunk/solutions/gui-building/eiffelvision-2/How-to-build-a-concurrent-graphical-application--EiffelVision-with-SCOOP.wiki b/documentation/trunk/solutions/gui-building/eiffelvision-2/How-to-build-a-concurrent-graphical-application--EiffelVision-with-SCOOP.wiki index bac01549..46a7ca2b 100644 --- a/documentation/trunk/solutions/gui-building/eiffelvision-2/How-to-build-a-concurrent-graphical-application--EiffelVision-with-SCOOP.wiki +++ b/documentation/trunk/solutions/gui-building/eiffelvision-2/How-to-build-a-concurrent-graphical-application--EiffelVision-with-SCOOP.wiki @@ -1,4 +1,39 @@ -[[Property:uuid|D1DDF411-5387-4A81-9A85-3EF8A2A4220D]] -[[Property:weight|0]] -[[Property:title|How to build a concurrent graphical application: EiffelVision with SCOOP]] -This page will be updated shortly with a short tutorial on how to use EiffelVision to provide a graphical user interface for a SCOOP-based concurrent application. \ No newline at end of file +[[Property:uuid|D1DDF411-5387-4A81-9A85-3EF8A2A4220D]] +[[Property:weight|0]] +[[Property:title|How to build a concurrent graphical application: EiffelVision with SCOOP]] +How can I build a concurrent graphical in application in Eiffel? + +Eiffel has a great library for producing graphical applications: EiffelVision. Eiffel also has a powerful concurrency mechanism: SCOOP. + +How do you make the two work together? This note gives you simple guidelines to ensure that the EiffelVision-SCOOP marriage is a harmonious and productive one. + +The first question: why does the problem even exist? Let's go back to the pre-SCOOP days. Any graphical application has an "event loop", which keeps watching for graphical user events, such as a mouse click, and triggering the corresponding application responses, such as saving a file (if the user clicked "OK" on a File Save dialog). If you were using multithreading, the event loop would run in the main thread, also called the GUI (Graphical User Interface) thread. + +Enter SCOOP. The old technique cannot work because a processor stuck in a loop cannot process any logged call! If you perform calls on a graphical widget, say the OK button, they will be logged right away, but they can only execute once the processor has exited its event loop. Not what you want. + +So here is what you should do: + +Since your application uses SCOOP, somewhere it creates a separate object. Let the creation instruction be + create s.make +where s is of a separate type (e.g. separate T). + +In the "make" creation procedure, create an EV_APPLICATION object, using an instruction such as + create my_app +with my_app of type EV_APPLICATION. + +Still in "make", create all the GUI elements. They will all be in the same processor that created the EV_APPLICATION object. + +Also in "make", start the application, using + my_app.launch +In the pre-SCOOP world, launch would start the event loop. Here it only creates a separate object (of type EV_APPLICATION_HANDLER), which will run the event loop, forwarding events to the EV_APPLICATION object. + +This is all the make procedure should do. Make sure it terminates with the preceding step. Otherwise, the event loop will never run! + +Now you can start using EiffelVision as you are used to, by sending GUI requests to the EV_APPLICATION object: + +* For requests coming from the same processor as s, just use the EV_APPLICATION object directly. +* For requests coming from another processor, you need access to that object; you can get it for example by through the feature ev_separate_application of class EV_SHARED_APPLICATION}. + + +That's all! Happy concurrent Eiffeling. +