[kepler-dev] [Bug 3150] - Need to add PTII Python actors back into Kepler

[Tristan King]

I've done a lot of work with jython (my web portal to kepler runs ontop
of jython), and played around with the PythonScript actor yesterday.

When jython caches jar files, it simply writes it's caches to a
directory cachedir, which is stored in the directory referred to by
python.home jvm arg. if python.home isn't set, then it get's written to
the same directory as jython.jar.

This cache is only created once and updated whenever it detects changes
to the jars it has caches, which may explain why it doesn't seem to
cache everything. I wouldn't think it's a big problem, but it may be
worth looking into the possibility of a "loading please wait..." dialog.

Also, I don't think simply including the jython jar is enough to enable
this actor, since it only includes the core set of python functionality.
there are a lot of libraries that are commonly used that need to be
included as well. I wrote a simple actor the other day that required the
use of the xml libraries.

If the user has an existing jython installation (like i do), simply
setting python.home to their jython directory will enable these
libraries. I've tested this and it works fine.

I'm not sure how you would wedge this into kepler now tho, the easiest
thing you could do is include the entire of jython in the kepler
distribution, and set python.home in the startup script. (i just added a
<jvmarg> to the build.xml, since i use ant run-dev to start kepler).

Being an avid python fan, I really like this actor.

On Mon, 2008-02-18 at 20:42 -0800, bugzilla-daemon at ecoinformatics.org
wrote:
> http://bugzilla.ecoinformatics.org/show_bug.cgi?id=3150
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> ------- Comment #2 from higgins at nceas.ucsb.edu  2008-02-18 20:42 -------
> I have added the python/jython actors back into my own copy of kepler for
> experimental testing. From the console output, the jython code is NOT caching
> ALL jar files on the class path when the actor is instantiated.(and the startup
> time is noticable but not severely long. It is going through some jars, but not
> all of them. I think we need to understand just what determines jython caching.
> 
> Dan Higgins- Feb 18, 2008
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