Table of Contents
Users that are writing their own plugin or users who are working with a Storyboard RTExec or Storyboard Lite plaform should familiarize themseleves with this section as it talks about how the Storyboard engine is initialized. If you are running on a system such as Linux or QNX, then the information in this section is not needed.
The Storyboard Engine is initialized in two steps:
The first step is to create the engine's application handle via the
gr_application_create_args function. This function
initializes the core framework and plugins and loads the UI model and
verifies its integrity.
Once the UI model is loaded then the main UI event loop can be started
using the gr_application_run function along with the
application handle returned from
gr_application_create_args. The
gr_application_run function will not return until the
application terminates.
The Integration API is thread safe so it is possible to terminate the application, by calling
gr_application_quit, in another thread. In general the
gr_application_create
and
gr_application_run
functions should be called from the same thread context since the initialization of some of the engine’s sub-systems may create thread local data required for execution.
When the application terminates, and returns from
gr_application_run, then the application handle should be released by calling
gr_application_free. Once an application handle has been released it is no longer valid to be used.
The Engine provides execution tracing functionality through the
gr_application_debug interface. This function takes an optional
application handle and an integer command value. Additional arguments may be
required based on the type of command and are documented within the
<gre/gre.h> header. This function is most often used to provide additional
diagnostics. For example invoking:
gr_application_debug(NULL, GR_DEBUG_CMD_VERBOSITY, GR_LOG_TRACE2);
will enable logging of all significant operations within the engine.