How to pragmatically create Tweak windows

Hi. John Sennesael and I have been hanging out on the #croquet
IRC channel and examining a problem we cannot figure out:

How do you pragmatically open a Tweak window in a Croquet world?

We looked at the code that creates a chat window and came up
with the following procedure. On a Croquet-1.0.18 image:

1. Get a KAT demo (leave the server blank)
2. get the gray debug halo, and choose "inspect morph"
3. In the inspector, run "self harness avatar openWindow"

This pops up a chat window in the croquet window, but also
causes an error to appear, due to "Processor activeProject hand"
being nil. Since this is a process-local variable, I guess I
need to do some kind of future send in order to be running in
the correct process. So, in the inspector, I try instead:

self harness avatar future openWindow

And nothing happens.

How does one do this? I don't understand how tweak's event
system works. The definitive article is not much help:
http://tweakproject.org/TECHNOLOGY/Whitepapers/TweakEventArchitecture/

--
Matthew Fulmer -- http://mtfulmer.wordpress.com/
Help improve Squeak Documentation: http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/808

It should also be noted that I tried the sample here:
http://croquetweak.blogspot.com/2005/04/scripts-in-croquet.html
which resulted in the vm freezing, in what seems like a semaphore
deadlock.

-John Sennesael

On 3/12/08, Matthew Fulmer <[hidden email]> wrote:
> Hi. John Sennesael and I have been hanging out on the #croquet
> IRC channel and examining a problem we cannot figure out:
>
> How do you pragmatically open a Tweak window in a Croquet world?

This is arguably not what you are doing.  The Tweak stuff that is in
the current images runs the Tweak world in the Croquet window, but in
the local user area outside of the replicated space.  The Tweak
windows that open up for various things can communicate with the
replicated island, but are not in it.

I can give you a half-cocked empirical answer, but someone else will
have to give the definitive answer.  There are at least a couple of
different processes running, and when you are trying to run this,
you're in the wrong process context.  There is a half-cocked way to
fix the error that you got, which is shown at the bottom of the page
at http://croquetconsortium.org/index.php/Peer-to-Peer_Chat_in_Tweak
This is all part of the fun way that Morphic and Tweak (especially
event handling) uncomfortably coexist in Croquet.  The code that runs
to service the menu items mostly avoids this little problem because
they are invoked from the Tweak world menu.  I guess that even then,
it's not really a sure thing.

Dave

David Faught wrote: Then lets forget creating tweak things in inspectors for now, and let me
ask this:

What is the easiest, shortest, method of creating an (empty) tweak
window inside a croquet harness/space/wherever when it starts?
As I have noted in my previous post, I tried the sample at:
http://croquetweak.blogspot.com/2005/04/scripts-in-croquet.htm which causes
the croquet harness to wait forever. I ran the code in the world
initialize method. Based upon what you are telling me, I am running this
code
from the wrong process. Then where do I put the code?

We tried deriving some classes from CroquetMenuProject/CroquetMenuWorld
trying to overload setupCostume and onBootstrap but this didn't work
either. You can find the code for this here:
http://jabberwocky.croquetproject.org:8889/tabletop/
If anyone could tell us why it isn't working and/or what we are doing
wrong it would be greatly appreciated!

-John Sennesael

On Mar 12, 2008, at 13:55 , John Sennesael wrote:

> As I have noted in my previous post, I tried the sample at:
> http://croquetweak.blogspot.com/2005/04/scripts-in-croquet.htm which  
> causes
> the croquet harness to wait forever.

These code snippets refer to a rather early version of Croquet (you  
may have noticed the 2005 post date). Much has changed since, so I am  
not surprised it does not work anymore.

The trick to make this run without problems is that you have to be in  
the right context. This is not simple from Morphic. But from Tweak it  
is simple.

For example, to open a workspace in KAT, insert two lines in  
KMenuBar>>menuBarNewMenu:

menuBarNewMenu
        | menu |
        menu := CMenu new.
        menu add: 'Workspace' target: self action: #actionNewWorkspace.
        menu addSeparator.
        menu add: 'Space' target: self action: #actionNewSpace.
        ...

and add a method actionNewWorkspace

actionNewWorkspace
        CWorkspace open

Then open KAT Demo, choose New - Workspace. As simple as it gets. From  
this workspace you can easily experiment with Tweak objects:

        p := CPlayer open.
        p color := Color red.
        0 to: 500 by: 5 do: [:i | p left: i; wait: 0.1].
        p close

Notice how this nicely animates while you can still interact with  
Croquet :)

You could as well start this snippet from the menu, make a method like

actionAnimDemo
        self startScript: [
                | p |
                p := CPlayer open.
                p color := Color red.
                0 to: 500 by: 5 do: [:i | p left: i; wait: 0.1].
                p close
        ].

- Bert -