GraphicsBuilder Experimentation

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!