Re: [Adonthell-devel] Redesign?

[Kai Sterker]

Am Dienstag, 19.08.03 um 09:04 Uhr schrieb Kenneth Gangstoe:

> Haven't followed this thread closely, so I have no idea if this is
> even remotely interesting :) But in ClanLib we solved the 
> initialization
> problems without using any hacks. Read more here:
>
> http://www.clanlib.org/ClanLib-0.7.cgi/Overview/getting_started.html

Hm. This looks interesting! So basically, the main method is part of 
the library, and the application is encapsulated in a class that gets 
'executed' by the library.

This looks like a step in the right direction. However, there are a few 
points we'll have to watch out for:

* we'll be using different backends that may need different 
initialization on
  different platforms.
* we'll have python scripts for various tasks, which should be able to 
use
  the same kind of initialization.

So, if we had a fixed main method within the adonthell library, it 
would need to know the backend the user wants, and of course it would 
need to know the platform it runs on. Latter is simple, since that can 
happen at compile time. The backend to use could be provided by the 
userdefined MyAdonthellApp class.

Remains the question how this would work from within a python script. I 
mean, the great advantage of the current design is that you can run our 
adonthell related scripts with an ordinary python interpreter. That 
means, we can't have that kind of initialization. There are two 
solutions I can think of:

* either we have to create a custom application to run the python 
scripts, much
  like the old pydonthell, which does exactly the above, but calls 
PyMain
  instead of a user provided main method.
* or, we rely on the python interpreter to do all the neccessary 
initialization
  for the platform it runs on. I recall that MacPython (which now is 
part of
  official Python 2.3) prepares everything for python apps to connect 
to the
  Quartz window server.

Latter would be the best solution, but I have not tried, whether that 
actually works. And I really would like to avoid the first.

Well, seems to get interesting again :)

Comments?

Kai