I have largely finished merging the MULTIDOC_BRANCH onto the head. This means
that the main application class is now edu.ucsb.nceas.morpho.Morpho, and
ClientFramework is gone. I have a few leftover bugs to fix (e.g., some images
aren't loading, and morpho doesn't think Metacat is available because the
"doPing" method was commented out for expediency, etc.). I'll clear these off
the list tomorrow, but I wanted you to be able to start back into your modules
on the head.
The query subsytem is largely working -- Jing has a list of minor todo's. Dan's
DATACENTRIC_DATAPACKAGE branch will need to be merged. Given that the old
implementation doesn't separate the UI much (GUI classes extend JFrame and do a
bunch of other stuff too), there will probably be some pain involved in this
conversion. The editor plugin has been converted, but does not make use of the
new windowing system (see below) because the DocFrame class was too much for me
to understand easily. I have to convert DocFrame so it no longer extends
JFrame, and this is going to take a while given that it does a ton of non-ui
stuff in there.
Below you'll find a brief overview of the new interfaces. See the more detailed
documentation in the MorphoFramework.svg and morpho-design.vsd design documents
if you want to know more.
The user interface parts of ClientFramework have been transformed into classes
that support multiple windows with menus, toolbars, and the status bar in each.
You can get a new window for use in your applicaiton by using a call like this:
MorphoFrame window = UIController.getInstance().addWindow("Some random title");
and you can close it using:
window.close();
These methods take care of updating the menus and other application wide
housekeeping, so you should use them religiously (ie, never instantiate a
MorphoFrame on your own).
The Services infrastructure has also changed. You now register a service using:
ServiceController.getInstance().addService(SomeInterface.class, this);
and you look up a service using:
ServiceController.getInstance().getService(SomeInterface.class);
You'll have to catch some exceptions in there, but that's basically it. Note
that both UIController and ServiceController are singletons so it is always safe
to call their getInstance() methods in a static environment.
I've also factored out the debugging/logging code to a new class called
"edu.ucsb.nceas.morpho.util.Log" that you can call statically like this:
Log.debug(9, "Whatever I need to output");
There's a bunch of other factoring that could and should be done on the Morpho
class (its still a mishmash), but this was the minimum that I could do to factor
out the JFrame parts. Hopefully we can come back to it and factor out the
networking code into a distinct network package sometime. But we'll see.
Enjoy, and comments appreciated...