Get java-gnome!

Source will always be better than binary

Download source

Installing binary packages provided by your distribution is certainly convenient, but java-gnome is easily built from source and you are welcome to do so.

Grab the tarball with latest release...

Like most GNOME projects, official releases of java-gnome in tarball form are hosted on the ftp.gnome.org servers. You can download the latest release from

http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/gnome/sources/java-gnome/4.0/

Or check out the sources from the repository...

For those who like to live on the bleeding edge, you can checkout the code from our version control repository (branch URL below). You'll need to install Bazaar, available in most Linux and Unix distributions.

$ bzr checkout URL

We try our best to keep 'mainline' in a buildable state, and certainly the latest bugfixes and improvements will be present there, but we can't guarantee that it'll be problem free. As ever when building pre-release code, you would do well to hang with us on IRC or mailing list so you're up to date with the state of the project in the current cycle.

... and build!

Regardless of which sources you get, the next step is to build them. Doing so is quite straight forward, but since java-gnome is a native library (and not just architecture independent Java bytecode), building it is a wee touch more involved than just compiling .java files. See README for more details of how to configure and compile the bindings.

Download binaries

Proper binary packages of the java-gnome will be available in many fine Linux and Unix distributions, allowing you to quickly and easily install the library on your system.

Distro specific instructions are available for each of:

If yours isn't on that list, or if they don't have the latest release, then it is certainly time to file a bug report!

And forthcoming,

Binaries from by third parties are necessarily used at your own risk. We encourage the developers in the various downstream distributions to actively participate in our project; if you're using packages provided by groups that do so you will find that the level of community interest and support will be quite high. Those on other platforms will necessarily meet with a less enthusiastic response, but Open Source is about choice, so try java-gnome where ever you like.

You can help by ensuring java-gnome is properly packaged for your operating system!

Detailed Source setup

If you're going to hack seriously with, or on, java-gnome, we recommend the following sequence to checkout the source code:

$ cd ~/src/george/
$ bzr init-repository java-gnome/
$ cd java-gnome
$ bzr checkout bzr://research.operationaldynamics.com/bzr/java-gnome/mainline/ mainline/
$ bzr branch mainline/ working/
$ cd working/
$ less README

This will result in a local copy of 'mainline' which you can use to track upstream and to diff against, and 'working' as new branch for you to experiment with. The branch will be at (in this example) ~/src/george/java-gnome/working/. All branches under ~/src/george/java-gnome/ will share storage of revisions, so you won't pay any penalty for creating as many branches as you like.

If you're using Eclipse, we recommend creating a branch in your Workspace and using that to work on. This will allow you to relatively easily change branches while not screwing up all your launchers. Either

1) create a symlink from your Workspace to whichever branch you're working on:

$ cd ~/workspace
$ ln -s ~/src/george/java-gnome/working java-gnome
$ cd ~/workspace/java-gnome/
$ less README

or,

2) use the switch feature within Bazaar.

$ cd ~/workspace
$ bzr checkout ~/src/george/java-gnome/working java-gnome
$ cd ~/workspace/java-gnome/
$ less README

(doing it this way allows you to later do

$ bzr switch ~/src/george/java-gnome/some-other-branch

to change between branches you have created with different lines of development. This works well, but is a more advanced layout. Do experiement with it to get a feel for it first)

From here you can easily create an Eclipse project called java-gnome at ~/workspace/java-gnome, and then use this as a dependency in your own projects.

Browse source

One of the interesting things about Bazaar (and many of the other modern Distributed Version Control Systems) is that when a repository is put online, you can usually have the source code directly available via HTTP. This means that if you want to quickly point someone at a particular file, it's as easy as directly linking to it at the URL you checked out from + the path to the file.

If you would like to browse the source code, here is the top of the 'mainline' branch (perhaps known as HEAD or trunk in other version control systems you might have used): http://research.operationaldynamics.com/bzr/java-gnome/mainline/