This afternoon I was experimenting with
GraphicsBuilder on Groovy, and I'm blown away. Andres has done an amazing job with GraphicsBuilder.
It took a bit of work to get setup because I wanted to play around with the SVG rendering support (which isn't included in the 0.5.1 package that is currently available). Once I built from the trunk, it worked like a charm. Below are the steps that I went through to set things up in case it is useful to anyone else.
Pre-requisites:1) Java 6
Make sure you have Java 6 installed for your platform. I'm on a Mac which doesn't have Java 6 support (grr...) so I went the
SoyLatte route.
2) Groovy 1.5
Make sure you have
Groovy installed. I ran into troubles when I tried to use the 1.6 snapshot (ClassCastExceptions) so stick with 1.5 for now.
3) Maven 2
We'll be building GraphicsBuilder from the Subversion trunk, so we need to install
Maven 2.
4) Subversion
Hopefully you already have the
Subversion, but if not, grab and install it for you platform.
Instructions:1) Setting up some environment variables at the commandline
export GROOVY_HOME=~/Source/groovy
export JAVA_HOME=/usr/local/java1.6
export PATH=$JAVA_HOME/bin:$GROOVY_HOME/bin:~/Source/maven/bin:$PATH
Obviously your paths will differ. Once this is done, we should be able to run our
java,
groovy, and
mvn commands without errors.
2) Download GraphicsBuilder from Subversion
svn co http://svn.codehaus.org/groovy-contrib/graphicsbuilder/trunk graphicsbuilder
3) Download the Batik 1.7 distribution
Download a copy of the
Batik 1.7 distribution and unzip it into our
graphicsbuilder directory.
4) Use Maven to build GraphicsBuilder
cd graphicsbuilder
mvn
If everything works for you, then proceed to the next step. For me, I ran into two problems. The first problem was that top level
pom.xml referenced
groovy-all-minimal as a dependency but the other
pom.xml files referenced
groovy-all as a dependency. This caused Maven to complain about a missing version and to fail. I fixed this by changing the top level
pom.xml file to reference
groovy-all:
--- pom.xml (revision 356)
+++ pom.xml (working copy)
@@ -77,7 +77,7 @@
org.codehaus.groovy
- groovy-all-minimal
+ groovy-all
${groovy-version}
This seemed to clear up Maven's problems and the build actually proceeded.
The other problem I ran into was that the Batik 1.7 jars weren't available in the Maven repositories so the build complained of missing dependencies. Fortunately Maven will allow us to install the required jars locally:
mvn install:install-file -DgroupId=batik -DartifactId=batik-awt-util -Dversion=1.7 -Dpackaging=jar -Dfile=batik-1.7/lib/batik-awt-util.jar
mvn install:install-file -DgroupId=batik -DartifactId=batik-util -Dversion=1.7 -Dpackaging=jar -Dfile=batik-1.7/lib/batik-util.jar
mvn install:install-file -DgroupId=batik -DartifactId=batik-gui-util -Dversion=1.7 -Dpackaging=jar -Dfile=batik-1.7/lib/batik-gui-util.jar
mvn install:install-file -DgroupId=batik -DartifactId=batik-ext -Dversion=1.7 -Dpackaging=jar -Dfile=batik-1.7/lib/batik-ext.jar
mvn install:install-file -DgroupId=batik -DartifactId=batik-svggen -Dversion=1.7 -Dpackaging=jar -Dfile=batik-1.7/lib/batik-svggen.jar
mvn install:install-file -DgroupId=batik -DartifactId=batik-dom -Dversion=1.7 -Dpackaging=jar -Dfile=batik-1.7/lib/batik-dom.jar
mvn install:install-file -DgroupId=batik -DartifactId=batik-svg-dom -Dversion=1.7 -Dpackaging=jar -Dfile=batik-1.7/lib/batik-svg-dom.jar
mvn install:install-file -DgroupId=batik -DartifactId=batik-parser -Dversion=1.7 -Dpackaging=jar -Dfile=batik-1.7/lib/batik-parser.jar
mvn install:install-file -DgroupId=batik -DartifactId=batik-xml -Dversion=1.7 -Dpackaging=jar -Dfile=batik-1.7/lib/batik-xml.jar
mvn install:install-file -DgroupId=batik -DartifactId=batik-gvt -Dversion=1.7 -Dpackaging=jar -Dfile=batik-1.7/lib/batik-gvt.jar
After that, I was able to kick off
mvn and build everything.
5) Install GraphicsBuilder into GROOVY_HOME
If you want to play around with GraphicsBuilder from the commandline, the easiest thing to do is to install it in your GROOVY_HOME:
cp */lib/*.jar $GROOVY_HOME/lib/
cp */target/*.jar $GROOVY_HOME/lib/
cp */src/lib/*.jar $GROOVY_HOME/lib/
cp */src/bin/* $GROOVY_HOME/bin/
chmod +x $GROOVY_HOME/bin/graphicsPad
chmod +x $GROOVY_HOME/bin/svg2groovy
You may also want to grab the build of GraphicsBuilder 0.5.1 because I think it may have included another jar or two that wasn't covered above (MultipleGradientPaint.jar, TimingFramework-1.0-groovy.jar, swing-worker.jar, and swingx-0.9.2.jar).
6) Play with it
You can either test it by running the
graphicsPad application or writing a script that calls one of the renderers:
import groovy.swing.j2d.*
import groovy.swing.j2d.svg.*
def foo = {
antialias('on')
circle(cx:0, cy:0, radius:300, borderColor:'black', borderWidth:4) {
multiPaint {
colorPaint('orange')
texturePaint(x:0, y:0, file:'/Users/jareed/Desktop/602.png')
}
transformations {
translate(x:500, y: 500)
}
}
circle(cx:300, cy:300, radius:150, borderColor:'black', borderWidth:4) {
multiPaint {
colorPaint('red')
texturePaint(x:0, y:0, file:'/Users/jareed/Desktop/602.png')
}
}
}
def gr = new GraphicsRenderer()
def sr = new SVGRenderer()
gr.renderToFile("/Users/jareed/Desktop/test.png", 1000, 1000, foo)
sr.renderToFile("/Users/jareed/Desktop/test.svg", 1000, 1000, foo)
which generates:
Nothing earth shattering, but it will be potentially interesting once I flesh out the project I want to use it on for. The best part, though, is that the SVG rendering works exactly as advertised. I had tried to do SVG rendering in the past using Batik's Graphics2D implementation (from a SWT app) and I couldn't get the background images to show up. Sweet!
