SplashScreen and NSApplication instance initialization

[Mike Swingler]

On Nov 30, 2011, at 7:17 AM, Anthony Petrov wrote:

> Hi Mike,
> 
> Thanks for your comments.
> 
> On 11/30/2011 3:14 AM, Mike Swingler wrote:
>> I'd actually suggest creating a helper process to show the splash screen with a minimal UIElement NSApplication instance, and would forward all clicks to the original process over IPC. This would have the added benefit of (potentially) showing the splash screen window before the Dock icon had completely materialized. The only major trick would be handing off image data that was extracted from a jar file (which could be done via a temp file).
> 
> Rather than playing with IPC, would it be simpler (and faster for that matter) to simply postpone showing the splash screen till the JVM is loaded and initialized but before calling user's main()? This way the NSApplicationAWT code (moved to the Java launcher) could access the necessary system properties. We don't exactly need to have the awt library loaded to init and start an NSApplicationAWT instance properly, do we? The only dependency is setting the ApplicationDelegate, but I guess this could be done later when AWT is finally loaded.
> 
> Do you expect any issues with this approach?

AFAIK, any callbacks the NSApplicationAWT class gets from AppKit will require calling into the AWT or the eAWT classes. It would not be wise to defer swapping in the NSApplicationAWT class after you have already created a window, since the NSApp is the arbiter of all of the top-level UI elements.

I think you might be able to pull off the splash screen without even doing any IPC, if you just pass arguments to it's main and use the exit code of the helper for any feedback.

Regards,
Mike Swingler
Apple Inc.