Application Model

The Core Library supports developers by providing a lightweight application model through the Core::Portable::Application class. This class maintains the application state, including initialization, runnning, and termination. It is called directly by the main function and provides the basic skeleton of the application. Each application should have only one Core::Portable::Application object.

Using the Application class

To create the application object derive an application class from Core::Portable::Application and implement the startup and shutdown methods.

#include "core/portable/coreapplication.h"

using namespace Core;
using namespace Portable;

class MyApp: public Application
{
public:
  // Application
  void startup () override;
  void shutdown () override;
};

void MyApp::startup ()
{
  // Put the application initialization in here
}

void MyApp::shutdown ()
{
  // Clean up and free resources
}

Since the Core Library runs on a variety of different operating systems and platforms, there’s no general recipe for the main function. In many cases, however, the application’s main entry point just obtains a pointer to the application object and calls its startup and shutdown functions. It may also need to perform other tasks, for instance, it may need to run an application loop.

int main ()
{
  MyApp* instance = MyApp::instance ();

  instance.startup ();

  while(running)
  {
      // Do work
  }

  instance.shutdown ();
  return 0;
}