Application Lifeycle

This chapter will describe the application lifecycle of the oZone framework, from init->run->termination.

Summary

At a conceptual level, initializing the oZone framework involves:

  • Initializing the debug/logging subsystem
  • Initializing various audio/video handlers to manage streams/decoding/encoding
  • Instantiating an Application object to manage application lifecycle
  • Instantiating various components per your need
  • Registering various components with each other to establish a workflow
  • Adding all components to the Application object so they can be started
  • Invoke the Application object’s run() method
../_images/applicationlifecycle.png

A high level view of the application lifecycle

The Application object can be thought of as the master object that keeps track of all the components. When components are instantiated, they register with the Application object by invoking its addThread() method. This essentially adds the object to the Application queue.

When you invoke the Application run() method, it iterates through the list of components and invokes the start() methof of each object, which essentially launches a thread for each component. Following this, it invokes the run() method of each component, which is what is expected to be the entry point of each component’s functionality.

Note that the Application object is just a convenience. You can easily invoke the start() method of each component yourelf. The latter approach is typically useful when you dynamically create new components and remove them after you start the application.

The Listerner and HTTPController components are used when you need to convert the frames of a component into a browser viewable version. Listerner along with HTTPController are an easy way to create MJPEG images which you can display on the browser with a simple <img src=""> tag.

More details

Application Life Cycle Manager

The Application object is really very simple. It’s implementation simply keeps a list of components. Components are added to the Application object by invoking its addThread() method which simply pushes a pointer to the component into its internal queue.

Once you connect all the components to the Application object, and you invoke the run() method, all it really does is iterate through the list and invoke the run() method of each component in a new thread (yes, each component must have a run method) and then waits for them to terminate.

Component Chaining

We also talked about how components could chain to each other to create workflows. Chaining is achieved by invoking a registerProvider method of a component.

Here is a live example:

 1
 2
 3
 4
 5
 6
 7
 8
 9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
 Application app;

 AVInput input( "input", "http://kxhcm10/nphMotionJpeg?Resolution=640x480&Quality=Standard");
 app.addThread( &input );

 FaceDetector detector( "detector" );
 detector.registerProvider( input );
 app.addThread( &detector );

 VideoParms videoParms( 320, 240 );
 AudioParms audioParms;
 MovieFileOutput movie( detector.cname(), "/transfer", "mp4", 60, videoParms, audioParms );
 output2.registerProvider( detector );
 app.addThread( &movie );

 app.run();

Explanation:

  • line 1 - create Application object (app)
  • line 3-4: create a provider component (input) that reads video feeds from a URL and add it to the application object
  • line 6 - create a FaceDetector processor component (detector)
  • line 7 - register the provider component of line 3 (input) to be the frame provider for this new face detector component
  • line 8 - also add this facedetector component to the master Application object (app)
  • line 10-12: instantiate a consumer component that will create video files (movie)
  • line 13: register the provider component of movie to be the facedetector component
  • line 14: add this output component to the master Application object (app)

Note

What just happened?

  • input will read frames from that URL
  • detector will attempt to detect faces in the frames input provides above
  • movie will attempt to create video files which will essentially be the same frames generated by input, but overlayed with face detection markers detector creates
  • line 16: launch all the threads and have fun!