I see there's work begun to move Processing towards an Ant build and I wanted to suggest an alternative before the investment became too great to reconsider.

Maven is a build tool (and more) that is very well aligned with how Processing is assembled. It could dramatically simplify the current build and file structure as well as add some new capabilities via its extensive selection of plugins.

I've spent a few hours the past two nights and believe I've got core, dxf, net, pdf, video, serial, opengl building (i.e. all but app, for which I have a few questions). In the process I've been able to remove a number of unnecessary files and simplify the management of external dependencies.

Maven removes the need to script most of the build by allowing the developers to declare their project structure and dependencies. Maven also simplifies cross-IDE development of the code--no more direct ties to Eclipse (though I, myself, am an Eclipse user).

If there's interest in pursuing this direction I could provide a patch with my current work for folks to take a look at. In fact, I could create two patches:
* The first would simply add pom.xml (Maven configuration) files to each project without having any further impact on the codebase. This would allow devs to try out Maven to build the individual jars.
* The second would additionally remove unnecessary files in the project.

Eclipse's support for Maven is quite good via the m2eclipse plugin and I highly recommend its use with the Subclipse plugin. (I like Subversive too, but Subclipse has better integration with m2eclipse.)

I'd be happy to assist and/or answer any questions. If there's interest in this approach I'd like a blessing to pursue it, perhaps posting submissions to Bug 151 or a new one.

-jeff

I'm new to the community, so not quite sure how it operates yet. I've continued to work in this, though, and am also running into the Antlr difficulties. It was pretty much a breeze getting the other projects to build.

If I can crack the Antlr problem I'll definitely submit my work. I've got a number of observations and questions about the code in any case that could hopefully lead to some improvements.

-jeff

I found your findings interesting, although I don't use Maven (out of ignorance/lack of time to discover/lack of real need).
Personally, I just went the easy way, compiling part of Processing on Windows with Eclipse with a little help from a .bat script...

I think that providing a way to use a good, modern tool, independent of IDEs, to do the compilation is interesting. I don't know if fry & al. are interested (I guess fry is taking a well earned break from Processing after making the 1.0.1 release...) but it is probably worth giving your method/files here. Hey, I might even try it!

Trying to answer some questions:
- preproc.pl: I am not a Perl guru, but it looks like it generates the part in PApplet.java that is after the "public functions for processing.core" sentence. That's to make all methods in PGraphics and PImage available directly in PApplet (which cannot inherit from them because it inherits already from Applet). Unless a new method is added (or a signature is changed), no need to touch it.
- apple.jar and QTJava.zip: my guess is that they are closed source files from Apple... QTJava is for supporting QuickTime (the video library).
- examples are reference are probably part of another process.

These are mostly (educated) guesses, I fear... :-D

I've provided a new patch with Maven poms at <http://dev.processing.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=151>. Still looking for feedback on a couple of things with the build before trying to tackle creating the distributions. Anybody game to try Maven out?

-jeff

I am a Maven 2 user and would be interested in contributing to the build conversion if the powers that be are so inclined.  I have used ant and have nothing against it, but prefer Maven 2.

As a slight tangent, if people are interested in using Maven as a tool to import into Eclipse and package their sketches, here are some notes that may be useful:

http://confluence.gordonturner.ca/display/NOTES/Processing+Notes

I use subclipse regularly, a great tool, but to most of my maven activities from the command line.

I understand that m2eclipse means I don't have to run the eclipse:eclipse goal, which is a nice touch.

<aside>
My experience has been that I setup the dependencies / create .project and .classpath files once, with minor tweaks later on.  Old habits I guess, I am a command line guy
</aside>

I am vacation for the next week, but will check out your scripts when I get back.

I really like the 'Export' and 'Export Application' features of Processing, very user friendly, I wish more IDEs where like this.

Selfishly, I would also like to see a 'To Maven' check box in the 'Export Application'.  Ideally, complete with a maven pom.xml created with the jar-with-dependencies part of the mvn install goal, to aide with the distribution.

Of course similarly a 'To Ant' check box could be create if the interest is there

G.

Hi.

I've deployed core.jar and OSGi-fied version of processing core to our repositoy:

http://cytoscape.wodaklab.org/nexus/content/repositories/releases/

http://cytoscape.wodaklab.org/nexus/content/repositories/snapshots/

You can use them on both plain-java environment and OSGi framework.

Regular jar
<dependency>
 <groupId>org.processing</groupId>
 <artifactId>core</artifactId>
 <version>1.0.3</version>
</dependency>


OSGi version:
<dependency>
 <groupId>org.cytoscape</groupId>
 <artifactId>processing-core-osgi</artifactId>
 <version>1.0.3-SNAPSHOT</version>
</dependency>

Thanks.
Kei

Hi Jeff.

For now, I've just deployed latest version of the core binary to our project repository.  I'm planning to use Maven and Processing+OpenGL lib in our future project, so I'll try to make a workflow to deploy latest version of those from source.

Also, since our system (cytoscape.org) uses OSGi framework, I'll try to deploy both "classic JAR" and OSGi bundles.

Kei