RFC: Loading animation for applets

[Omair Majid]

Deepak Bhole wrote:
> * Omair Majid <omajid at redhat.com> [2009-05-27 13:31]:
>> Hi,
>>
>> The attached patch adds an applet loading animation for IcedTeaPlugin to  
>> icedtea6.
>>
>> The patch adds binary files (images). A mercurial bundle is available  
>> from http://icedtea.classpath.org/~omajid/applet-loading-animation.hg.  
>> (Use hg unbundle to apply it.)
>>
>> The main change is adding an animator class to NetxPanel. This  
>> PluginAppetLoadingAnimator shows the animation in the panel until the  
>> applet has initialized. To have the animator stop when the applet has  
>> finished initializing, extra events have been added. All these events  
>> are now sent by AppletPanel instead of NetxPanel since only AppletPanel  
>> knows exactly what the state of the applet it.
>>
> 
> I see you are patching AppletPanel. Can't this be done instead by
> drawing the image in a panel added to the main applet panel via 
> PluginAppletViewer? Changing upstream classes for the plugin should be
> avoided unless absolutely necessary...
> 

The hook for the image drawing code is through NetxPanel which is not 
part of upstream. The patch to AppletPanel makes the applet emit more 
events to any AppletListener listening. This allows us to find out when 
Applet.init() completes and stop the animation, which matches the 
behaviour of Sun's plugin. Without this patch, the animation would only 
display until init() is called.

I agree about patching upstream classes, but I couldn't see any other 
way to find out when init() has completed (short of adding more code and 
a specialized listener class to AppletPanel). If you still think this is 
a bad idea, let me know, and I will remove it.

Cheers,
Omair