What are kroutines, xvroutines, libraries, toolboxes ?

A program for Khoros must be created under the suite of tools that Khoros provides. This makes software development easier and assures that every program can use the Khoros libraries for data manipulation, basic routines and more. Just adding existing C programs cannot use all functionality of Khoros, but converting existing C programs to work with Khoros is straightforward.

In this section we will explain some of the terms used in Khoros programming. The words "program" and "software object" or "object" are used with the same meaning here.

Toolboxes

Before creating any object in Khoros you must create a toolbox to contain these objects. After creating a toolbox you can change several parameters of it, and move objects from one toolbox to another, add more programs to a toolbox or delete programs from a toolbox, but a little planning before creating the toolbox could save some time later.

Even if you have the right permissions, it is not advisable to use an existing Khoros or third-party toolbox to add your objects. Doing this will complicate things when you need to upgrade your Khoros system or distribute a toolbox. Creating a toolbox to hold your own objects is safer and more fun, and the step-by-step information on how to do it will be explained in Creating a new Toolbox .

Kroutines

Kroutines can have associated library calls (called lkroutines ) which contains all functionality for the program. The advantage to do this is that your program functionality could be called from other programs as a function. Another non-official advantage is that when Khoral Researchcreates the workspace-to-single-program thingie, it will probably use this approach.

Xvroutines

Libraries

The nice thing about libraries is that you can reuse code - write a library for basic image manipulation, for example, and you will be able to call it from all programs in the toolbox that contains this library. Additionally if you create another toolbox and make it dependent on the first toolbox (more about this in Making a toolbox dependent on other ) and voila, the second toolbox will be able to access the functions on the first. This alone is a good reason to design your programs with separate modules that can be added in libraries.

Panes

Scripts

User Interface

Khoros has the functions to visually create these user interfaces, and skeleton programs can be created based on the user interfaces. Later the user must add functionality to the programs. We will see all these steps in the programming examples.

Creating a new Toolbox

To create software objects in Khoros you must first create a toolbox or activate an existing toolbox. To do this, you need to run craftsman . It will show the following window:

On the left list box, we have the currently installed toolboxes, on the right (if a toolbox is selected) we have the list of objects on that toolbox.

To create a toolbox, click on the "Toolbox operations" menu button and select "Create Toolbox". The following window will appear:

Fill the fields of this window with the toolbox information:

• Toolbox Name: enter a single-string name for the toolbox, avoid names already existing.
• Toolbox Path: enter the path for the toolbox. You must have full write permissions on that path. It will be a good idea to use the path exclusively for the toolbox so the klint program can be used to check if the files under that directory are related to the toolbox. If the directory of the toolbox is not empty craftsman will give an error message when you try to create the toolbox.
• Toolbox Title (optional): enter a string with the title of the toolbox
• Toolbox Author Name: your name (will be obtained from the file .khoros_env )
• Toolbox Author E-mail: your e-mail (will be obtained from the file .khoros_env )
• Toolbox Status: Set to Development. If you set to Scratch or Work its components will not appear on Cantata's menus.

For the programs in this tutorial we will create a new toolbox called... tutorial. The window filled with the data for this new toolbox will look like:

(of course with your data instead of the ones in the fields of the image above). To create the toolbox, press the "Create Toolbox" button. After some seconds, the toolbox will be created and you can press the "Close" button to close the Create Toolbox Window.

The next step would be creating a new software object in the toolbox. This will depend on which kind of software object we will be creating, so it will be covered in the tutorials for each software object.

These pages copyright © Rafael Santos (e-mail valid until March 1998). Please let me know if this tutorial is useful for you, I need to justify the time I used to develop it. Comments, requests and bug reports are also welcome, but please see the section Before you e-mail me...

Khoros copyright © Khoral Research, Inc. (KRI) - run klicense for more information.
Khoral Research Inc. is not responsible for or is supervising these pages.

The latest version of this document can be found at Ejima Lab Khoros Pages at Kyushu Institute of Technology, Japan (until March 1998).
Mirrors for this tutorial can be found at Universidade do Vale do Paraíba, Brasil and PUC/RS, Brasil.