syncany-team team mailing list archive

[Philipp Heckel <philipp.heckel@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hello Vincent,

I tried to fiddle something together for the Unity "appindicator" tray. It
conflicts with your changes in the "gui" branch, and it's not completely
working:

https://github.com/binwiederhier/syncany/commit/d772bdae76fee8b3f12cd9ed23c9c25d876c6719

Since Unity removed SystemTray support entirely now, this solution is (like
in 2011) using an additional Python script to instantiate the tray. I added
a TrayIconFactory to create a tray depending on the desktop environment
(Linux/Unity -> UnityTrayIcon; others: DefaultTrayIcon).

The DefaultTrayIcon is your code; the UnityTrayIcon starts the python
script. The communication between the python script and the Java code is
via the daemon websocket, so:

1) unitytray.py (WS client) -> daemon WS Server (forwards) -> UnityTrayIcon
(WS Client)
 --> e.g. for events {'action': 'tray_menu_item_clicked', 'command': 'NEW'}

2) and UnityTrayIcon (WS Client)  -> daemon WS Server (forwards) ->
unitytray.py (WS Client)
 --> e.g. for events {"text":"All files in
sync","action":"update_tray_status_text"}

*Issues:*
*a) Python:* Introducing a new language (Python) usually comes with issues
(deployment, dependencies, IPC, etc.). Any pure-Java alternatives for
Appindicator support are welcome. I have not found any back in 2011, and I
couldn't find any now... Ideas?

*b) Indirect communication: *The code is nowhere near stable, but the
communication works quite well. However, I'm not sure that the indirection
via the daemon WS Server is such a good idea. Any thoughts? Maybe the
UnityTrayIcon should simply start its own WS Server and let unitytray.py
connect to it.

*c) Deployment: *The Python script obviously must be put somewhere when
deploying the application (e.g. in "bin/"). This is currently not done. The
script only works if "Launcher.java" is started from Eclipse.

*d) Python script resources*: The Python script needs the same resources
(tray.png, etc.) as the DefaultTrayIcon, but it cannot access the resources
from a JAR. That means the deployment must include the extracted resources
somewhere.

*e) Event abstraction: *Both DefaultTrayIcon and UnityTrayIcon should fire
events to a central source, such that onExitClicked(), etc. only has to be
implemented once.

@Vincent: You obviously don't have to take my entire code, but I hope it
helps with the Tray stuff.

Best
Philipp