[squeak-dev] Does anyone recall the background on WorldState>>startBackgroundProcess?

Marcel Taeumel marcel.taeumel at hpi.de
Sun Nov 12 15:12:58 UTC 2017


Hi Dave,

I suppose that it was an idea on how to let Morphic projects run in the background, which addresses mainly stepping and drawing -- I guess. Yet, I could not find a working implementation in the code base. While I think it would be useful in general, remote image interaction might have been the trigger then. :-)

Best,
Marcel
Am 12.11.2017 04:24:41 schrieb Bob Arning <arning315 at comcast.net>:
I honestly don't know what it was intended for -- I never used it and can't see where anyone else did. If I were to hazard a guess, one might connect some remote users to a project and switch locally to another project and then call this method to allow the remote users to continue to interact with the project they started with and which you, locally, are not currently connected to. Just a guess, however.


On 11/11/17 10:04 PM, David T. Lewis wrote:

Thanks Bob, I am curious about the original motivation. If I look at how Project works now, and how I expect that they may have originally been intended to work, it makes perfect sense that more than one Project might be "running" concurrently, even if nobody has actually done anything with that idea for that last 15+ years. Was that part of the idea behind #doOneCycleInBackground? Or am I reading too much into it? Dave On Sat, Nov 11, 2017 at 07:08:13PM -0500, Bob Arning wrote:
I doubt anyone was working on it in 2001 -- Andreas was probably just updating how [A|a]ctiveHand was used. I put the halt in #doOneCycleInBackground while getting multiple projects running currently. Since nobody has complained about the halt and I don't see any evidence it was used in earlier times, I'd not worry about it. On 11/11/17 4:53 PM, David T. Lewis wrote:
This looks like something that Andreas may have been working on circa 2001, and I see Dan Ingalls initial stamps from 1999. It looks to me like a mechanism for allowing a project other than the current project to be running a UI process associated with a RemoteHandMorph, so I am envisioning a Squeak image in which I am interacting with the current Project, while someone elsewhere on the network might be remotely interacting with another project in this same image. Am I guessing right? I stumbled across this while trying to tidy up unnecessary references to the global World variable. Certainly if one wanted to have two projects active at the same time (e.g. Project current and some other remotely controlled Project), it would be good to avoid refrerences to a global World, hence my curiosity here. It does appear to be an unfinished experiment, given the self halt that appears in WorldState>>doOneCycleInBackground. Dave
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