Re: [gtkmm] Using threads ...

[Christer Palm <palm nogui se>]

Hi!

andre-junior wrote:
> I'd like to known if i need to use
> Glib::Dispatcher all the time i need
> to change something in screen

Strictly speaking, no. You can also use gdk_threads_enter() / 
gdk_threads_leave() to ensure that all calls to GTK are serialized.
In practice, though, you'd probably be better off using Glib::Dispatcher 
or a similar mechanism.

> and if
> so, how can i wait for something
> happen (the dispatcher notification
> happens asynchronously).

You should check out libSigCX (http://libsigcx.sourceforge.net/). 
Although a little hard to grasp at first, it has great capabilities for 
cross-thread signalling (including synchronous signals).

> The biggest
> problem is that in this system there
> is only on service to show a
> "messagedialog" for example, and all
> the threads call this service to show
> the dialog, and either the main thread
> or the other threads can call this
> function.

Perhaps you should revisit your design? Most well-designed apps separate 
presentation from application logic in an MVC pattern or similar. In 
that case your application logic would never call GTK+ functions 
directly, but rather provide a mechanism for the presentation logic 
(i.e. the View) to get notified about changes that would (potentially) 
change the View. If you use libSigCX thread-tunneled signals for that 
mechanism, you'd easily be able to put all GTK stuff in a single View 
thread almost transparantly.

--
Christer Palm