Langton's ants in SVG [was a jipd-grid problem]

[Marcus G. Daniels]

>>>>> "PT" == Pietro Terna <address@hidden> writes:

PT> Quitting jipd-grid, that now runs perfectly on my Win Me pc, I
PT> obtain: *** event raised for error: SourceMessage *** function:
PT> _i_Schedule_c__drop(), file:
PT> /src/Swarm/swarm/src/activity/CompoundAction.m, line: 236

That program¹ does a bunch of desperate things to force a shutdown,
but it's trying too hard and barking up the wrong tree.  There's no
handling for window close events, etc. and in the end Java ends up in a funk.

If you want to do Java GUI programming, I would suggest you not do the
cargo-cult programming thing based on that example, and instead start
from scratch, following a book tutorial on Swing, etc.

Anyway, an easy way to force a clean shutdown (a workaround) is to
replace the last `drop' with a call like "System.exit (0);"

On another topic, lately I'm rather enamored with Scalable Vector
Graphics (SVG) and I really find all this Swing stuff kinda boring and
provincial.

For example, check out this little asteroids game using the Adobe SVG plugin.²

  http://www.kevlindev.com/games/roids/roids.htm

.. and Langton's ants!

  http://www.kevlindev.com/workshop/ants/index.html

So you say that JavaScript is slow?  No worries, we can push³ the
SVG document object model tree via the native code Swarm engine. 
So that's native code content creation (by Swarm) and layout (by the browser).

¹ I mean that in the Monica Lewinsky sense

² No, Mozilla's built-in SVG isn't up to the job yet -- have to use
  the Adobe plug-in.

³ When Swarm issues a call to COM it is an array offset and a function call.
  No Objective C dispatching -- fast!

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