Really interesting news- Im going to check it out- Iv always kept an eye on jmax and really glad to see it coming back !
On Tue, Sep 21, 2010 at 9:11 PM, Maurizio De Cecco
<jmax@dececco.name> wrote:
Hallo,
my name is Maurizio De Cecco, and i am the maintainer and developper of the jMax Phoenix project,
a kind of cousin of Puredata. Having release a new beta for jMax (on Linux and Mac OS X), and after
discussing with Miller Puckette, i think the members of this list may be interested in knowing more
about the project, and may be take a look.
A bit of history: i worked in Ircam in the 90s, where i was lucky enough to work with Miller Puckette
on Max/ISPW and following versions; i then worked on jMax, that was intended to be a 'next generation'
Max for the Ircam projects; jMax was used in a few large productions; i left in 99 for pursing other
interest (Linux Mandrake, at that time :), and forgot for a while about jMax.
In the meanwhile, jMax was put under a GPL licence, and after a couple of years Ircam stopped its development
(don't ask me why, i wasn't there).
In 2008 i was getting severely bored: server side Java, quality indicators and software engineering was my daily bread, and no code to write; so, to keep my developer mind healthy, i took up the development
of jMax, starting from the last release i worked on.
Given the fact that jMax slept a few years, it cannot compete with puredata in terms of available libraries,
patches, and in general maturity of the solution.
But it have its own peculiarity, a number of different ideas, and having a code base but no users (yet, i hope:)
allows some bold design decision to be taken; think of jMax Phoenix as a kind of research project in same family where Puredata is.
Describing the differences between jMax and Puredata would be long, because it would need to go back
to the original developments; to be very synthetic i would resume in the following:
1) Architecture: the jMax user interface run on a different process, and it written in Java.
2) APIs are completely different, but see below.
3) The Object Set is reduced to the old ISPW object set; jMax can also transparently include LADSPA plugins as objects; finally, i developped compatibility layer (to be completed) that allows to recompile simple pd objects for jMax, and possibly to load pd abstractions.
4) User Interface: there is a lot of work going on in the UI, that allows, between other, the used of a single window IDE style interface.
5) Packaging and configuration: jMax Phoenix support the packaging
of complex libraries and applications in a single file, and even automatically grab libraries from the internet.
6) The language: jMax support the use of expressions in object definition, like in | int ( 10 + $foo) | so that objects in abstractions can be parametrised with respect to the arguments.
7) Hopefully in between 6 month and a year: an optimising dsp compiler
and engine able to run a patch in parallel on multiple core (where multiple means around 8).
For anybody more interested, the project site is http://www.jmax-phoenix.org/, and the
binaries and sources can be loaded from the project sourceforge site, http://sourceforge.net/projects/jmax-phoenix/
For your information, i include at the end of the mail the formal announce of the 0.6 beta release; it does not mention the Max OS X version, that was not ready at the time.
Maurizio
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
After many month of development, we are proud to announce the version 0.6 beta of jMax Phoenix.
The major highlights for this version are:
- A first version of the puredata source compatibility kit, including the build system and a full example of recompiled object library.
- A large set of usability bug fixed; all the bugs preventing a smooth work flow have been fixed.
- Error handling improvements: most of the bugs and configuration errors now results in error messages, and not unexplained freezes.
- A set of examples and tutorials has been recovered from old ISPW archives; they are not updated to include all the major jMax functionalities, but it is better than nothing.
Full release notes are available in the release notes section of the projet site.
This release has been tested on Ubuntu and Ubuntu Studio 10.04, Debian 5, Fedora 13 and Mandriva Spring 2010; check the installation
instruction on the projet site for specific caveats for Debian and Fedora.
The Puredata compatibility sub-project has been *very* time consuming; in order to better manage my scarce time resources,
we need some user feedback (and possibly help) to be able to evaluate the actual interest of pursuing this development direction.
For more information and download and installation instructions go to
http://www.jmax-phoenix.org/.
For contacting the project team: contact@jmax-phoenix.org
The jMax Phoenix team
__________
Maurizio De Cecco -
Music: http://www.myspace.com/mauriziodececco
Blog: http://maurizio.dececco.name/
Software: http://www.jmax-phoenix.org/
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