Hi Mark,
I have to apologize for confusing the issue. When I said "create an application class" I meant "write the code for an application class". Of course, the actual class object is created inside DesktopApplicationContext.main, so (right now) there is no way to create it first before this call. So, (again right now) you would have to use Sandro's mechanism to pass parameters to your main class, or what you have come up with. I'm thinking, though, that we could possibly add an alternate signature for DesktopApplicationContext.main that would accept an already created application object, instead of the class object. Maybe I will look into that, if it would help you in your use case?! Looking at the code, it is a little tricky, but I think I can rearrange the code to accommodate the existing signatures (Class, String[]) and (String[]) as well as provide a (Application object, String[]) as well by delegating to some other internal methods. Maybe this would help with Sandro's use case with Groovy as well?? BTW, are you using the release (2.0.3) version or are you building from SVN trunk? If the latter, I could perhaps provide a patch for you to try.

Again, thanks for using Pivot,
~Roger

On 1/25/14 9:23 AM, Mark R. Chambers wrote:
Hi All,

Thanks Sandros for your feedback I will take a look at the classes.
Roger I don't understand how you think you can call
DesktopApplicationContect.main after you create a class and still pass
variables back and forwards, unless you are talking using super for the
constructor, which has the same problems as using Startup.
Currently I have changed my code so the main class extends Application and
then I change the constructor to the Startup method, it works fine, but does
make the application GUI centric...

Anyway thanks again both of you for your support.

Regards,
Mark.
-----Original Message-----
From: Roger L. Whitcomb [mailto:roger.whitc...@actian.com]
Sent: Wednesday, 22 January 2014 12:36 AM
To: user@pivot.apache.org
Subject: RE: How to Run Application without DesktopApplicationContext

So, our application is a desktop app, but there is a considerable amount of
work that is done in the "main" method of the application before it ever
calls DesktopApplicationContext.main(...), which in turn invokes the
"startup" method of the main class, and etc.  So, there is no particular
reason that you can't create an application class that has all the variables
/ state that you need, and when you need to display the GUI, at that time,
call DesktopApplicationContext.main....  And as Sandro has said, his new
classes give you some further help passing state into the Pivot application
(in addition to what I just described).

HTH,
~Roger

-----Original Message-----
From: Sandro Martini [mailto:sandro.mart...@gmail.com]
Sent: Tuesday, January 21, 2014 5:39 AM
To: Users - Apache Pivot
Subject: Re: How to Run Application without DesktopApplicationContext

Hi all,

My application is not GUI centric, and I don't want to make the GUI the
main part of the application.
How can I pass variables back from  DesktopApplicationContext or start a
pivot application without  DesktopApplicationContext?

Under trunk (for Pivot-2.1.0, still in development) I put some new classes
related to this:
ApplicationWithProperties and ApplicationWithPropertiesTest .

Take a look and tell us if there is something that should be
updated/improved, even for your needs.


Note that some month ago I put some test Groovy scripts and classes under
Pivot-Stuff ( http://code.google.com/a/apache-extras.org/p/pivot-stuff/ ) in
the project pivot-stuff-common-groovy ... under scripts and test you can
find some minimal example fro using Pivot in a little different way.
As soon as I find some time I should update these examples (or add
others) using the new method added in ApplicationWithProperties , so for
example I could get GroovyClassLoader from Groovy and set into Pivot
application, etc ... I hope this can help you.


Bye,
Sandro


2014/1/21 Mark R. Chambers <m...@mrchambers.org>:
Hi Roger,



Thanks for your reply.  Previously I was using Swing and my own XML
parser to create the GUI. So it was called with for example GUIPanel
mGUIPanel = new GUIPanel() from my main application class that
controlled various devices and the database connections;

Then I could just access the MGUIPanel.mState information etc...

The application can be run headless, so sometimes there is not a GUI,
but I guess I can hack around that...



I can probably modify the DesktopApplicationContext.main (to maybe
mainReturn) to return, a reference to the application return type(Just
calls main and then returns the reference....)

Or I could change the architecture to have it GUI centric... It just
that my diagrams would then need to change... and they would not look
at neat:]



Anyway I think your answer is, that currently it is not supported:] It
would be a nice feature, since probably not everybody wants to use
Pivot from main...



PS-Thanks for the Pivot Framework, I like the code;] Although the
documentation still needs massive amounts of work;] And the Component
Explorer needs to be finished;]

PS2- If I get some time I will start adding to the Wiki... to try to
minimise the learning cliff;]

Regards,

Mark.



From: Roger L. Whitcomb [mailto:roger.whitc...@actian.com]
Sent: Tuesday, 21 January 2014 1:35 AM
To: user@pivot.apache.org
Subject: RE: How to Run Application without DesktopApplicationContext



Hi Mark,

                 Welcome to Pivot.  I'm sorry that you're having
trouble, but let me see if I can help.  To start with, could you tell
me what the original application was written in (i.e., what GUI
framework you were using)?  How did you pass information back and
forth between the GUI and the main application before (i.e., was it some
kind of RPC, or what)?
                 Currently Pivot has just two modes of operation:  as a
desktop app, or as a browser applet.  These two would use
DesktopApplicationContext and BrowserApplicationContext.  There is
probably no real reason we couldn't have a third type of application
(maybe an "EmbeddedApplicationContext" that would act more like the
GUI object that you're talking about).  At this moment I wouldn't know
exactly how to go about writing such a class, but I don't know of any
technical reason why it couldn't be done.  At some point you have to
hook into AWT and connect to a GUI widget and the event handling
(event loop) for it, but that (I'm pretty
sure) could be wrapped in a slightly different way than
DesktopApplicationContext does it (which pretty much assumes it is the
main program of the application), but maybe more like
BrowserApplicationContext (which obviously is assuming it is wrapped
inside a browser as an applet).
                 There should be no reason you couldn't pass
application arguments even to a DesktopApplicationContext via the
command line stuff even now.  Or if you are using a message bus, or
some other RPC mechanism, why you couldn't use that with Pivot also.
Unless I'm misunderstanding the way your app is architected.  So, maybe
you could explain a bit more.
                 Again, thanks for trying Pivot, and I hope we can get
you going!



~Roger



From: Mark R. Chambers [mailto:m...@mrchambers.org]
Sent: Monday, January 20, 2014 6:11 AM
To: user@pivot.apache.org
Subject: How to Run Application without DesktopApplicationContext



Hi Pivot,



My application is not GUI centric, and I don't want to make the GUI
the main part of the application.

How can I pass variables back from  DesktopApplicationContext or start
a pivot application without  DesktopApplicationContext?



BACKGROUND:

I have an existing application and I am replacing the GUI component
with Pivot, it is a component of a much larger application. I
previously just had a GUI object that I called and it made the GUI
etc. and I could pass state information and values back to the main
application. Is there any way to do this with pivot? Or do I need to
modify the pivot src? (Or choose another GUI option, although I have
battled with pivot for 3 days. to convert my GUI, and now find out
that I can't seem to be able to get any variables back to the main
program.)



Regards,

Mark






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