Have been too busy with work lately to even think about working on my project…

Well for those who haven’t noticed it yet, I have started to work a little bit on Toobo’s application architecture. For a start I have chosen to go with a multi-process model with each core functionality running as a separate process.

For example, I have split up the app into the following processes.

• The origin script – This is an odd one out in the following list. This script would startup any process that needs to be in place while Toobo is alive and running.
• Startup Manager – Manages any start up work like drawing a loading screen, going to the last saved screen etc.
• Standby Manager – Handles putting the device in standby and taking it out of standby mode. Provides hooks to perform any low priority tasks during standby.
• Shutdown Manager – Handles saving preferences, last visited screen, shutting down various subsystems cleanly before Toobo shuts down.
• Input Manager – Receives input, notifies the state machine, ignores keys when necessary.
• Sound Manager – Takes care of audio playback, mute & unmute mechanisms.
• Screen Manager – This guy is tied closely to the core state machine and contains the code that would help one draw a screen on toobo.
• more to come…

Of course, the directory structure and process architecture has not yet been finalized. This is still a work in progress. As and when I find issues with the architecture that I have picked I plan to go back a few steps and correct the issues. (Well in reality this is a tough one but I have to do what is right so that Toobo has a long life )

I still need to decide on what IPC mechanism to use to communicate and synchronize various processes/threads. One of the ideas I thought that was cool even though it is a bit slower is to use Unix domain sockets to communicate between various processes. I can use netcat to test each core process independently and unit test them.

I still need to look into pre-existing solutions like SDL to manage the UI event loop… I will document any useful projects and ideas here when I come across them.

Gotto go for now…

Tags: app design, architecture