SplashScreen and NSApplication instance initialization

[Anthony Petrov]

Hi Mike et al.,

For the SplashScreen we need to initialize an instance of NSApplication 
before JVM (and hence AWT) are loaded. I'm trying to move the code from 
the NSApplicationAWT.m into the Java launcher code so that it would be 
shared by both the splashscreen library and the AWT.

The problem I've encountered is that certain settings are retrieved from 
the JVM properties:

// needed by registerWithProcessManager:
apple.awt.application.name
sun.java.launcher
apple.awt.UIElement
apple.awt.BackgroundOnly

// needed by finishLaunching:
apple.awt.application.nib
apple.awt.application.icon


Since the JVM isn't initialized yet when the splash screen code is 
launching, the properties aren't available. Some parameters have 
alternative ways of discovery (e.g. there are more options to retrieve 
the application name in addition to using apple.awt.application.name, 
and they are all tried in the code), however, the rest of them have not 
such alternatives.

I've made a quick test by creating a generic NSApplication instance in 
the splash screen code. Later, when the AWT has started (in the 
"embedded" mode, sort of, since the event loop has already been started 
by the splash screen library), I called the registerWithProcessManager 
and finishLaunching methods static for the NSApp (I've turned them into 
static methods before that so that I could apply them to any kind of 
NSAPplication, not only the NSApplicationAWT). This didn't do much 
though. The only pieces of code that seem to be useful or did anything 
at all seem to be a) the "// HACK BEGIN" section that helped make the 
app foreground and display it in the dock (although with a generic, 
OS-provided icon only), and b) the menu update loop at finishLaunching 
(which oddly added the new items rather than updated the default ones; 
and it didn't change the name of the application menu itself).

Note that the icon in the dock wasn't updated to the Java icon, and 
neither was the main menu updated automatically - I had to switch to 
another app, and then back to my test to make the menu show. Note that 
the app's title was just "java". I realize that in part this is because 
the registerWithProcessManager should actually happen before the 
application instance is even constructed, but that was just a quick 
test. Besides, I don't understand why would the finishLaunching code not 
do its job properly - it just has to be executed some time after 
starting the event loop. Did the fact that a window has already been 
shown on the screen prevent it from updating the dock icon?

Anyway, to make it all work right we probably need to enhance the 
JRSAppKitAWT interface so that it could update those values rather than 
register them just once. We could provide some default values from the 
splash screen code, and later initiate an update at the time when AWT 
has finally loaded. Is this possible?

Another option is to declare that the mentioned properties are simply 
not supported in case the app uses a splash screen. After all, the 
properties don't seem to belong to Java specification anyway. However, 
it would still be cool to (at least) have a shiny Java icon in the dock 
and a proper application title in the main menu. How do we do that if we 
choose this way?

--
best regards,
Anthony