[PD] jMax Phoenix

[Maurizio De Cecco]

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 at 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/