Sugar Components
Sugar Components
This is a continuation of Understanding sugar code. Here, we are in the middle of walking through a sugar shell initialization to see all of the packages and utilities used in the sugar environment. Previously, we saw how Fedora is set up to launch sugar within a python context. Sugar had python launch Matchbox as an X windows environment, and DBUS as an interprocess messaging bus. After importing serveral python libraries (sys, os, gtk, & gobject), and some sugar environment libraries (env, logger, profile, & TracebackUtils), sugar is now going to continue setting up by importing special core python libraries and instantiating various classes and routines... Let's see what happens:
Sugar Package & Module Imports
The sugar-shell has already imported python and sugar environment modules, but now, sugar starts to import component modules from the view and model packages:
>>> from view.FirstTimeDialog import FirstTimeDialog >>> from view.Shell import Shell >>> from model.ShellModel import ShellModel
This looks a good bit like a Model, View, Controller design pattern.
Also, here is a bit about Python Modules and Packages.
Sugar's View Package
This thing's python path is sugar.view
It includes these modules:
- ActivityHost
- BuddyIcon
- BuddyMenu
- FirstTimeDialog
- OverlayWindow
- Shell
- clipboardicon
- clipboardmenu
- stylesheet
And these sub-packages:
- frame -- Manages the sugar ui side frames.
- home -- Manages the sugar ui center for the Mesh, Friends, & Donut views.
Sugar's Shell Package
Sugar's Shell package pulls lots of services and system interfaces together and unifies them into a full user interface. The Shell module is a part of the View package.
Imports:
- logging (sugar logger)
- gtk
- gobject (gtk module)
- wnck -- (don't know this one yet)
Lots of Sugar UI imports:
- view.stylesheet
- style
- HomeWindow
- PresenceService
- ActivityHost
- ActivityFactory
- Activity
- Frame
- ShellModel
- HardwareManager
- KeyGrabber
- AudioManager
- env
- sugar
Sugar's Model Package
The Model Packages has the following modules:
- BuddyModel -- Tracks the details and connection to a single buddy on the mesh
- Friends -- Adds and removes Buddies to a list of friends
- Invites -- Invites Buddies to shared activities.
- MeshModel -- Tracks Activities, presense, and connections
- Owner -- Tracks details about the OLPC owner (nickname, icon, etc.)
- ShellModel -- Tracks List of Activities, Presence, List of Friends, Home, also announces presence of computer to others.
- homeactivity -- This class is instantiated to control a running activity.
- homemodel -- This is the data model used to manage a running activity.