Hi<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"> Maurizio<div><br></div><div>Really interesting news- Im going to check it out- Iv always kept an eye on jmax and really glad to see it coming back !<br>
<br><div class="gmail_quote">On Tue, Sep 21, 2010 at 9:11 PM, Maurizio De Cecco <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:jmax@dececco.name">jmax@dececco.name</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex;">
Hallo,<br>
<br>
my name is Maurizio De Cecco, and i am the maintainer and developper of the jMax Phoenix project,<br>
a kind of cousin of Puredata. Having release a new beta for jMax (on Linux and Mac OS X), and after<br>
discussing with Miller Puckette, i think the members of this list may be interested in knowing more<br>
about the project, and may be take a look.<br>
<br>
A bit of history: i worked in Ircam in the 90s, where i was lucky enough to work with Miller Puckette<br>
on Max/ISPW and following versions; i then worked on jMax, that was intended to be a 'next generation'<br>
Max for the Ircam projects; jMax was used in a few large productions; i left in 99 for pursing other<br>
interest (Linux Mandrake, at that time :), and forgot for a while about jMax.<br>
<br>
In the meanwhile, jMax was put under a GPL licence, and after a couple of years Ircam stopped its development<br>
(don't ask me why, i wasn't there).<br>
<br>
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<br>
of jMax, starting from the last release i worked on.<br>
<br>
Given the fact that jMax slept a few years, it cannot compete with puredata in terms of available libraries,<br>
patches, and in general maturity of the solution.<br>
<br>
But it have its own peculiarity, a number of different ideas, and having a code base but no users (yet, i hope:)<br>
allows some bold design decision to be taken; think of jMax Phoenix as a kind of research project in same family where Puredata is.<br>
<br>
Describing the differences between jMax and Puredata would be long, because it would need to go back<br>
to the original developments; to be very synthetic i would resume in the following:<br>
<br>
1) Architecture: the jMax user interface run on a different process, and it written in Java.<br>
<br>
2) APIs are completely different, but see below.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
5) Packaging and configuration: jMax Phoenix support the packaging<br>
of complex libraries and applications in a single file, and even automatically grab libraries from the internet.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
7) Hopefully in between 6 month and a year: an optimising dsp compiler<br>
and engine able to run a patch in parallel on multiple core (where multiple means around 8).<br>
<br>
For anybody more interested, the project site is <a href="http://www.jmax-phoenix.org/" target="_blank">http://www.jmax-phoenix.org/</a>, and the<br>
binaries and sources can be loaded from the project sourceforge site, <a href="http://sourceforge.net/projects/jmax-phoenix/" target="_blank">http://sourceforge.net/projects/jmax-phoenix/</a><br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
Maurizio<br>
<br>
-------------------------------------------------------------------------<br>
<br>
After many month of development, we are proud to announce the version 0.6 beta of jMax Phoenix.<br>
<br>
The major highlights for this version are:<br>
- A first version of the puredata source compatibility kit, including the build system and a full example of recompiled object library.<br>
- A large set of usability bug fixed; all the bugs preventing a smooth work flow have been fixed.<br>
- Error handling improvements: most of the bugs and configuration errors now results in error messages, and not unexplained freezes.<br>
- 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.<br>
<br>
Full release notes are available in the release notes section of the projet site.<br>
<br>
This release has been tested on Ubuntu and Ubuntu Studio 10.04, Debian 5, Fedora 13 and Mandriva Spring 2010; check the installation<br>
instruction on the projet site for specific caveats for Debian and Fedora.<br>
<br>
The Puredata compatibility sub-project has been *very* time consuming; in order to better manage my scarce time resources,<br>
we need some user feedback (and possibly help) to be able to evaluate the actual interest of pursuing this development direction.<br>
<br>
For more information and download and installation instructions go to<br>
<a href="http://www.jmax-phoenix.org/" target="_blank">http://www.jmax-phoenix.org/</a>.<br>
<br>
For contacting the project team: <a href="mailto:contact@jmax-phoenix.org" target="_blank">contact@jmax-phoenix.org</a><br>
<br>
The jMax Phoenix team<br>
<br>
__________<br>
Maurizio De Cecco -<br>
Music: <a href="http://www.myspace.com/mauriziodececco" target="_blank">http://www.myspace.com/mauriziodececco</a><br>
Blog: <a href="http://maurizio.dececco.name/" target="_blank">http://maurizio.dececco.name/</a><br>
Software: <a href="http://www.jmax-phoenix.org/" target="_blank">http://www.jmax-phoenix.org/</a><br>
<br>
<br>
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</blockquote></div><br></div>