DjVu decoder communication mechanism.
Files "DjVuPort.h" and "DjVuPort.cpp" implement a communication mechanism between different parties involved in decoding DjVu files. It should be pretty clear that the creator of DjVuDocument and DjVuFile would like to receive some information about the progress of decoding, errors occurred, etc. It may also want to provide source data for decoders (like it's done in the plugin where the real data is downloaded from the net and is fed into DjVu decoders).Normally this functionality is implemented by means of callbacks which are run when a given condition comes true. Unfortunately it's not quite easy to implement this strategy in our case. The reason is that there may be more than one "client" working with the same document, and the document should send the information to each of the clients. This could be done by means of callback lists, of course, but we want to achieve more bulletproof results: we want to be sure that the client that we're about to contact is still alive, and is not being destroyed by another thread. Besides, we are going to call these "callbacks" from many places, from many different classes. Maintaining multi-thread safe callback lists is very difficult.
Finally, we want to provide some default implementation of these "callbacks" in the library, which should attempt to process the requests themselves if they can, and contact the client only if they're unable to do it (like in the case of request_data() with local URL where DjVuDocument can get the data from the hard drive itself not disturbing the document's creator.
Two classes implement a general communication mechanism: DjVuPort and DjVuPortcaster. Any sender and recipient of requests should be a subclass of DjVuPort. DjVuPortcaster maintains a map of routes between DjVuPorts, which should be configured by somebody else. Whenever a port wants to send a request, it calls the corresponding function of DjVuPortcaster, and the portcaster relays the request to all the destinations that it sees in the internal map.
The DjVuPortcaster is responsible for keeping the map up to date by getting rid of destinations that have been destroyed. Map updates are performed from a single place and are serialized by a global monitor.
Alphabetic index Hierarchy of classes