[kepler-dev] Splash screen and corresponding changes

[Kevin Ruland]

Hi all.

The only way for me to get the splash screen to work correctly was to 
build our own main loop which builds the splash screen prior to running 
VergilApplication.main.  I think the reason for this is 
VergilApplication runs everything using Swing.invokeLater which seems to 
do something weird with the thread priorities and ends up making the 
splash behave very badly.  So I created the 
org.kepler.gui.KeplerApplication so do just that.

I'm writing this note to inform people that if they are running under 
eclipse and want to see the splash screen (It doesn't really do anything 
so you're not missing out), you will need to change your main from 
VergilApplication to KeplerApplication.  I have made the corresponding 
changes to build.xml's various targets which used to use VergilApplication.

One thing to think about in the future, since we need to have our own 
main for this purpose, this provides us with a place to do a little more 
with command line arguments.  For example, we could hard code the 
'-kepler' argument into our main when envoking VergilApplication.  Also 
we can combine the VergilApplication and PtExecuteApplication startups 
and provide another switch to run "head-less" or "batch" mode.  What I 
mean is we could interpret an argument like "-batch" as an indication to 
run PtExecuteApplication instead of VergilApplication.

I was able to test the auto_kepler.bat and ptexecute.bat files here, but 
for some reason auto_kepler.sh doesn't seem to work under cygwin.  Can 
somebody please check that script?

Kevin