Glenn Linderman wrote:
On approximately 7/5/2004 3:50 PM, came the following characters from the keyboard of Dean Arnold:
After building a standalone of a fairly large DBI+Tk app (resulting .exe is 5.7 MBytes), the first execution is pretty lengthy. Is there anyway to open a splash screen for that initial load ? I realize you need Perl plus some GUI modules loaded before PAR could even try to run a BEGIN script, but is there any way to order the unpacking so the modules needed for a simple splashscreen get unpacked first, then display the splash while the remaining unpack/compile operations proceed ?
Maybe splash screen, a common enough operation, should be a PAR feature?
Either with a new switch, or if a file named splash.bmp or splash.jpg or something exists (PAR implementers can figure the details), then it is displayed mid-screen ASAP, while the rest of the unpacking proceeds.
Yeah, that was my thought. Actually, I'm thinking it needs to be platform specific code compiled into the C stuff, and the supplied splash is just a GIF/PNG/JPG image (to keep it simple). That way there's no need to wait for core Perl to get unpacked.
Q: is PAR/pp generating an executable ZIP ? If so, does that library have a splash screen capability ? (I vaguely recall that WinZIP or one of those tools had such a feature for creating executable ZIPs)
Alas, I don't have anough smarts to figure out how to plug it into the PAR C files. I started looking at source and got cross-eyed pretty quickly.
Regards, Dean Arnold Presicient Corp.
