Gaphor Idle Threads

The Gaphor UML modeling tool written in Python uses GTK as its' user interface library. GTK is a good choice as it is portable across many platforms and has a nice feature set. What is also nice about the GTK library, from a development perspective, is it as fairly straightforward to handle events that are triggered from the user interface. Such events may be user-generated, such as mouse clicks on widgets. Other events, may be generated by the widgets themselves. Either way, adding a handler for any event such as these is trivial. Using gobject, developers can also add handlers that are executed in between events, such as when the event loop is idle.

In any GTK application, there is a main event loop that must be instantiated within the application code. This is going to be one of the very first actions executed because without it, there will be no responses to GTK events. Every time an event is triggered inside a GTK main event loop, the event instance is placed in a pending event queue. Once the event has been processed, or handled, the event is no longer considered pending and is removed from the queue. So what this means is that the GTK main loop can be viewed, at a high level, as having two distinct states; pending and free. These states are illustrated below.



Here, the initial state represents the instantiation of the GTK main event loop while the final state represents the termination of the main loop. The termination often means that the user has exited the application successfully but could also mean that the application has exited erroneously. Regardless, there are longer any GTK events that will be processed once the main loop has exited, even if the containing application has not exited.

As illustrated, the GTK main loop as to states while running and two transitions between these states. The GTK main event loop will transition to a pending state when there are one or more pending events. The GTK main event loop will transition to a free state when there are zero pending events.

Gaphor defines an idle thread class that makes good use of all this GTK event machinery. The GIdleThread class uses gobject.idle_add() to add a callback to the GTK main event loop. This callback is only executed when there are zero pending events. Actually, it will still execute if there are pending events with a lower priority but that doesn't necessarily concern the concept here. The key concept is that the callbacks created by GIdleThread are only executed when the GTK main loop is idle. The GIdleThread class is illustrated below.



So the nagging question from developers is, why add this abstraction layer on top of the gobject.idle_add() function? Simply put, the GIdleThread class is used to assemble queues when the GTK main loop isn't busy. The obvious benefit here being that queues of arbitrary size can be assembled without sacrificing responsiveness to the end user.

An example use of this class is to read and parse data files. The generator function that yields data is passed, along with the queue that will eventually contain all the parsed data to the GIdleThread constructor. This abstraction also provides the thread-like feeling for developers that use it. Although not a real thread, it looks and behaves like one and is ideal for constructing queues.