[kepler-dev] what's the deal with org.kepler.loader.InitClassPath?

Wed Oct 29 12:11:30 PDT 2008

Without getting into questions concerning Jython, I wanted to briefly
address one point made by Dan.

Similarly, many users don't know what ant is, don't have it installed, or
know how to use it.

It should be noted that Ant can be used to manage the class path, even if
users do not know about Ant or have Ant installed. Ant is just Java. All the
classes associated with Ant are stored in jars, most prominently ant.jar. It
is perfectly possible for any Java program to use all the features of Ant in
the background without the user knowing or caring or having ant installed,
as long as ant.jar is included in the lib directory.

David

On Wed, Oct 29, 2008 at 12:02 PM, Dan Higgins <higgins at nceas.ucsb.edu>wrote:

> Hi All,
>   As Christoper noted, Jython was originally removed from Kepler due to its
> helping to make Kepler startup very slow. That problem was fixed and the
> base part of Jython is in Kepler 1.0 so that the Python actors from Ptolemy
> will run in Kepler. Note that it was fixed in Kepler by changing startup so
> that actors are instantiated when actually used.
>   It would be nice to have all possible Jython classes available if the
> startup problem can be avoided. However, the number of users/developers that
> actually want to use Jython had not been very large in the past; maybe the
> demand has increased.
>   Note also that in previous version of Kepler, we tried to avoid using
> environment variables for setting paths, primarily because we ran into a
> number of potential users (not developers!) (especially on Windows) who
> don't have a clue as to what an environment variable is and how to set it!
> (Similarly, many users don't know what ant is, don't have it installed, or
> know how to use it.) So if we add more pieces to the jython installation, we
> do need to consider how to make its use as easy as possible.
>
> Dan Higgins
>
>
> Christopher Brooks wrote:
>
>> Hi Chad,
>>
>> BTW - one reason that Jython was removed was because it wanted to
>> traverse the entire classpath and create cache files of all the
>> jars.  This made Kepler's start up time very slow.
>> This has probably been addressed because Kepler should no longer
>> be instantiating every actor at start up.  However, this is
>> something to watch for, these issues have a way of coming back.
>>
>> The full version of Jython was fairly large, which is why Ptolemy
>> includes only a portion of it.  A separate module for Jython
>> would mean that all of Jython could be made available.
>>
>> The Jython developement effort was on hold for a few years, but
>> there was some activity within the last year or so.
>>
>> _Christopher
>>
>> Chad Berkley wrote:
>>
>>> Hi Tristan,
>>>
>>> I think this class is there so that the classpath can be amended to allow
>>> for different versions of the same class in different jars.  I think Dan
>>> Crawl last worked on it, so I'll let him explain more.  I think it's a bug
>>> that it finds files in the .svn directories.  They should probably be
>>> explicitly excluded from the search as we will never want anything in those
>>> directories in the classpath.
>>>
>>> We have plans to overhaul this system sometime in the next year when we
>>> start re-architecting the core of kepler.
>>>
>>> As for including all of jython in kepler, I don't have a problem with
>>> that as long as it isn't 20 MB of jar files or something huge like that.
>>>  We're in the process of breaking kepler up into modules which will be built
>>> by a single build system.  A Jython module would probably be a nice addition
>>> to kepler.  I'm hoping to have the new directory structure for the modules
>>> sorted out in the next week or so and I'm almost at a point where I can
>>> check in the changes that I've made to split the core of kepler away from
>>> other functionality.  Needless to say, there are some pretty large changes
>>> coming to Kepler in the next couple weeks. You might want to wait just a bit
>>> until we get this new system in place before adding Jython.  We'll make an
>>> announcement to the community when everything is ready to go.
>>>
>>> thanks,
>>> chad
>>>
>>>
>>> Tristan King wrote:
>>>
>>>> I've been messing around with kepler's jython support recently trying to
>>>> get kepler to use my system's jython install rather than the jython.jar
>>>> included with kepler and run into an interesting problem.
>>>>
>>>> The InitClassPath class recursively goes through the lib/jar/ directory
>>>> and adds anything it finds to the classpath. This includes the
>>>> .svn/**/*.jar.svn-base files. Thus, even if i overwrite the
>>>> lib/jar/jython.jar file, the lib/jar/.svn/prop-base/jython.jar.svn-base file
>>>> is found and added to the classpath, and since . comes before j, the .svn/
>>>> version of jython.jar takes precedence in the classpath. I haven't tested
>>>> this, but assume that this would effect any other files in the lib/jar/
>>>> directory. If you try and update a library, you wont be able to test it
>>>> until you check the file into svn, which overwrites the stored .svn version
>>>> of the file.
>>>>
>>>> Is there any advantage to the InitClassPath class other than removing
>>>> the need to write out the classpath manually in release builds? Because I
>>>> can't see one, and I don't think the aforementioned reason is a good reason
>>>> for trying to build something that ant provides already, and does right!
>>>>
>>>> --
>>>> Tristan King
>>>> Research Officer,
>>>> eResearch Centre
>>>> James Cook University, Townsville Qld 4811
>>>> Australia
>>>>
>>>> Phone: +61747816902
>>>> E-mail: tristan.king at jcu.edu.au <mailto:tristan.king at jcu.edu.au> www:
>>>> http://eresearch.jcu.edu.au
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>>>
>>>>
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>>
>>
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