compiling processing sketchs from the commandline?

Question

I'm a blind student who has to use processing in a programming class. Is it possible with the current 1.01 version to compile sketch files from the commandline and view any errors?

Update This link helped me fix my problems, I'll write a blog post about it when I have time.

http://processing.org/discourse/yabb_beta/YaBB.cgi?board=os_core_pde;action=display;num=1224645998

Answer 1

After digging through the revision log I found the documentation for the Commander class, which explains that you have to create a separate build from source to use the command line version of Processing.

Answer 2

I didn't check with Processing 1.01, only with 1.2. After confronting myself with the same issue, finally i managed to get this working. Using the plain command prompt from windows first You have to compile the .java files to .class by using the following command:

> javac -classpath <path to processing>/lib/core.jar *.java

If you don't specify the path to the core processing library, then you get an error like: package processing.core does not exist.

The next step is to compress the java .class files to .jar file. This can be done with the following command:

> jar <command> file.jar {manifest.txt} *.class

where the manifest file is optional. If you got some error, complaining the path wasn't defined, you need to trace the path to the java library, by using the command:

path c:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.5.0_09\bin;%path%

If everything is ok, then You should get a jar file, which You can use on Your sketch folder.

Answer 3

Isn't processing made in java?

I guess you can just compile with javac as usual.

Like:

javac yourclass.java

If you have the packadges installed correctly the java compiler should find them easily i think.

Answer 4

No, I can't find any way to compile Processing files from the command line. Despite the fact that they claim they've added this feature in (reply #7), there's no mention of how this actually is done.

I looked over the instructions on converting Processing code into Java code and its essentially adding in the necessary libraries and wrapper classes. Of course, in practice it looks to be unfeasible (as your initial question showed) to do on your own.

I'd say your best bet is to pester the guy on the given link who said he added it in and ask for some documentation on how it's done. Furthermore, I think you can get the bug re-opened since it doesn't count as a bug fix if they don't tell you how to do it, or at least a reference to the manual showing where this is discussed.