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Server

The Server class bridges the gap between the low-level library and the high-level library. It saves you from the micromanagement work of the ../PicoGUI protocol, but it isn't an object-oriented abstraction yet. However, some people may prefer to write applications using the Server class only, if they're not comfortable with object-oriented and event-driven programming. This is an acceptable use of the library.

Instantiation

You can instantiate a server with zero to two arguments. The first argument, when present, is an internet address (anything that is accepted by the standard python socket module) and defaults to "localhost". The second argument, when present, is a display number, and defaults to zero. In the future (WishList), there will also be support for Unix socket connections, but for now only TCP/IP is supported.

String, font and bitmap handling

Server objects provide special methods, getString(). getFont() and getBitmap() for handling objects that are stored in the pgserver. It uses a string representation - the string or bitmap data itself, for strings and bitmaps, and a font spec in the format family:size:flags (where multiple flags are separated by additional colons, and any field may be empty as soon as at least two colons are present) - and keeps an internal dictionary of handles. So, if your code uses the same string twice, you don't have to know about it; just use getString("foo") and the Server object will transparently allocate it the first time, and reuse the same handle the second time.

WishList: getBitmap() is there but unimplemented, as it would require means of finding the image dimensions. This needs to be discussed.

Constants

The ../PicoGUI protocol uses a lot of special numerical values. When you use the C library, you use constants; but in python, names like PG_S_ALL are, well, not all right.

For most of these values, when dealing with Server objects, you can instead use a mnemonic string, like "all". The Server module looks up these strings in a hierarchically contextual way, so for example in server.set(my_widget_id, "side", "all") the "side" string will evaluate to 2 and "all" will evaluate to 2048. In server.set(my_widget_id, "align", "all"), the "all" string would however evaluate for 9, because that's the correct value in an "align" context.

Requests

If you call a method of the Server object with the same name as a function in the RequestsModule (case-insensitive, so you can use CamelCase or betterCamelCase or even ALLCAPS if you wish), it will call this function (after processing all string constants), send the resulting request, wait for an answer, and return it.

Example

See HelloWorldWithServer

Status

UpToDateStatus