Application Initialization

Applications that use specific facilities of the Access Grid Toolkit should create an Access Grid application and initialize it. This is needed if, for example, a developer will rely on argument processing, logging, the various configuration classes, or the certificate infrastructure. The two application classes are CmdlineApplication and WXGUIApplication; an example of initializing a CmdlineApplication is as follows.

from AccessGrid.Toolkit import CmdlineApplication
app = CmdlineApplication.instance()
app.Initialize('MyApp')

Standard Arguments

Standard arguments accepted by all applications are given below.

Additional command line arguments can be added as follows.

TBD

Logging

Many of the Access Grid application classes log their activity. When initialized, this logging facility writes information to a logfile in the user's home directory, with the name of the file derived from the application name given when the application was initialized. In the case of the initialization example above, then, there should exist a MyApp.log file in the Logs directory:

Linux, OSX

~/.AccessGrid3/Logs

Windows

C:\Documents and Settings\%USERNAME%\Application Data\AccessGrid3\Logs

The AG logging support relies on the Python logging module. Applications can use the logging facilities as follows.

TBD

Configuration classes

The three configuration classes include SystemConfig, AGTkConfig, and UserConfig. These classes encompass information about the system, the Access Grid toolkit configuration, and the user configuration, respectively (obviously).

SystemConfig

Examples of SystemConfig methods include the following. Alternatively, view the full list of SystemConfig methods

GetFileSystemFreeSpace()
Retrieve the amount of free space on the system.

GetUsername()
Retrieve the name of the user running the software.

AGTkConfig

Examples of AGTKConfig methods include the following. Alternatively, view the full list of AGTkConfig methods

GetInstallDir()
Retrieve the software installation directory

GetDocDir()
Retrieve the documentation directory

UserConfig

Examples of UserConfig methods include the following. Alternatively, view the full list of UserConfig methods

GetProfile()
Return path to user profile

GetPreferences()
Return path to preferences file

Relevant Types

Many of the data types that a developer will encounter are included in a single file, Descriptions.py. Some of the types defined in this file include:

DataDescription
Description of a venue data file

StreamDescription
Description of a multicast or unicast address (i.e., stream)

VenueDescription
Description of an Access Grid Venue

VenueState
Description of the contents of an Access Grid Venue

Supporting documentation

Subversion

http://www.ci.uchicago.edu/trac/accessgrid/browser/trunk

View the code in Subversion, complete with revision history.

API Documentation

Documentation is generated from the code for each released version.

• AG 3.1 API Documentation

If you discover any problems with this or other documentation, please file a bug report in Bugzilla under the product 'Documentation'. In particular, the generated documentation is relatively new (as of May 2008), so there may well be problems in this documentation and they should be reported liberally.