SplashScreen and NSApplicationAWT

[Mike Swingler]

I think that the simplest design going forward is it kick off a small command line helper process that links against nothing but AppKit, and embeds an Info.plist in it's binary that contains an LSUIElement=true property (so LaunchServices won't inflate a Dock icon for it when it starts).

Regards,
Mike Swingler
Apple Inc.

On Nov 23, 2011, at 10:30 AM, Phil Race wrote:

> I suspect you'll have to do something like #1.
> 
> Previous advice on another topic is not to rely on X11. Sounds like a hybrid monster in any case.
> My gut is that this is something to steer well clear of.
> 
> Is it possible for an app to start a cocoa event loop for splashscreen, then exit that
> when AWT is ready to launch  .. and start up the real one ? I'm afraid the answer
> here will probably be no .. and its probably impossible to do whilst keeping the
> splashscreen visible, but its worth asking.
> 
> -phil.
> 
> On 11/23/2011 8:11 AM, Anthony Petrov wrote:
>> Hello,
>> 
>> Another issue with the splash screen is that it needs to display a window on the screen. For this purpose the Cocoa event loop must be started, and as such an NSApp instance be initialized. And this instance is a singleton in Cocoa.
>> 
>> I see that there's already a custom NSApplication descendant present (the NSApplicationAWT), and we can't create and initialize it at the time of splash screen showing since the AWT dynamic library isn't loaded yet.
>> 
>> I see two options to resolve this:
>> 
>> 1. Move the NSApplciationAWT code into the Java launcher code. Either the splash screen code, or AWT would trigger the creation of an application instance. This approach, however, might require a lot of refactoring.
>> 
>> 2. Use Xlib to display the splash screen. This must be the easiest solution, although it may appear a bit inconsistent to the end user (the X icon flashing in the dock, etc. - but perhaps there's a way to suppress that?) Also, I'm not sure if an Xlib-based app is able to actually initialize Cocoa later.
>> 
>> Any thoughts on this?
>> 
>> -- 
>> best regards,
>> Anthony
>