Difference between revisions of "Slicer3:Launcher"

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[[2007_Project_Half_Week#Projects | One of the projects]] at the 2007 AHM was a [[media:2007_AHM_Programming_Half_Week_Slicer3_Launch.ppt | review of the Slicer3 launcher]].
 
[[2007_Project_Half_Week#Projects | One of the projects]] at the 2007 AHM was a [[media:2007_AHM_Programming_Half_Week_Slicer3_Launch.ppt | review of the Slicer3 launcher]].
  
A summary of the conculusions is:
+
A summary of the conclusions is:
 
* for the shared library plugins to work the application needs to be built in shared mode (not static)
 
* for the shared library plugins to work the application needs to be built in shared mode (not static)
 
* this means that shared library paths must be set ''before'' the application is started
 
* this means that shared library paths must be set ''before'' the application is started

Revision as of 14:57, 10 February 2007

Home < Slicer3:Launcher

Requirements

One of the projects at the 2007 AHM was a review of the Slicer3 launcher.

A summary of the conclusions is:

  • for the shared library plugins to work the application needs to be built in shared mode (not static)
  • this means that shared library paths must be set before the application is started
  • a launcher can do this -- it is a small program that does not have shared library dependencies that sets paths and then executes the main application

Some other nice things the launcher can do:

  • since the launcher starts quickly, it can put up a splash screen for user feedback while the main program is loading
  • the launcher can catch abnormal termination conditions of the main program and provide user feedback
  • the launcher can run arbitrary programs with the exact environment used by the main application (for example, you can run a debugger on Slicer3-real with all the shared libraries resolved, or you can run a shell from which you can run ldd to see the dependencies for a library).

Implementation

The group decided to adopt the approach used by slicer2, which is based on the starkit/starpack technology for building small, stand alone programs that include a full tcl/tk interpreter.

The code and documentation are in Slicer3/Utilities/Launcher. The actual startup script is Slicer3/launch.tcl.in, which gets configured by cmake into Slicer3-build/lib/launch.tcl.