Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

"J. Lewis Muir" <[email protected]> · Tue, 16 Sep 2014 14:37:02 -0500

On 9/16/14, 12:58 PM, Nerses Gevorgyan wrote:
> Let me ask this way: Is RULES_JAVA supported? Is there any better
> solution?  What is "standard" build mechanism for EPICS Java
> application?

Hi, Nerses.

I don't build any of my EPICS CA Java applications or libraries with the
EPICS Base build framework.  But I don't want to rule that out for you
because there may be people using it; I'm just not one of them.

When you say "EPICS Java application," what do you mean?  Java libraries
and applications that I write only interface with EPICS via Channel
Access (CA).  To do this, they need an EPICS CA library.  One such
library is JCA/CAJ [1].  It's confusing, unfortunately, but JCA is a
set of Java classes and interfaces as well as a JNI implementation
for using native EPICS CA libraries from EPICS Base.  JCA does not
include the native EPICS CA libraries from EPICS Base; you'd have to
build or obtain them separately.  CAJ is a 100% Java implementation of
the interfaces provided in JCA; it does not require native EPICS CA
libraries from EPICS Base.  So, for a 100% pure Java EPICS CA library
for the Java libraries and applications I write, I use the Java classes
and interfaces from JCA with the Java implementation from CAJ, and I
refer to this as "JCA/CAJ."  This solution requires no native EPICS CA
libraries from EPICS Base.

Given this, I build my EPICS CA Java applications and libraries like
any other Java application or library; I use Ant [2].  The "JCA/CAJ"
library dependency is just two JAR files: jca-[VERSION].jar and
caj-[VERSION].jar.  I treat them like I would any other library
dependency.  Obviously, another very popular choice for building Java
applications and libraries is Maven [3]; you could use that instead of
Ant if you prefer.

Regards,

Lewis

[1] http://epics-jca.sourceforge.net/
[2] http://ant.apache.org/
[3] http://maven.apache.org/

Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System

Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System