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Fantom to Standalone Jar tool



I wrote a small tool (in Fantom) that will take some Fan code(pods) and build a standalone jar from it that can be run in a regular JVM.

The jar is ~1MB for an app that does not use FWT(SWT) or other external libraries.

It's pretty raw at the moment but I've tried it and it works well.

What's the use ?


This allows to run a Fantom app without having the user have to manually install/setup a Fantom environment.
Sometimes people are unwilling/unable to install runtime environment, this use to be an issue with Java itself ten years ago when people did not want to install a JRE.

Also it allows to quickly deploy your Fantom app to any machine that has a JVM which can be useful for various reasons.

How to use it


You can fetch the code from: http://bitbucket.org/tcolar/fantomutils/src/tip/fanjar/

hg clone http://bitbucket.org/tcolar/fantomutils/src/tip/fanjar/

  • Step1: Build the javaBuilder pod so it's avalaible in your Fantom install:
Juts needed once
cd fanjar/javaBuilder/
fan build.fan


  • Step2: Copy / Edit buildHelloApp.fan to build Your own app

Make a copy of buildHelloApp.fan(example) for your app (say buildMyApp.fan), and edit it

buildMyApp.fan
using javaBuilder
class BuildMyApp : BuildJar
{
  override Void setup()
  {
    podName  := "helloWorld"
    destFile = scriptDir+`helloWorld.jar`
    pods = [podName]

    appMain = podName
 }
}

Refer to the BuildJar script for explanation of the fields.

By default no external libraries (SWT) are added to keep it light, if you want to add some, adc them to the libExt list, see the Example.

  • Step 3: Run the script. fan buildMyApp.fan

This will create the jar (ex: helloWorld.jar)

You can now simply run it as any other Java jar, ex: java -jar helloWorld.jar

How it works



Jar creation:
The jar is created this way:
  • We add the Fantom 'runtime' (lib bin)
  • We add the user specified pods (pods) and all the dependent pod (we figure those out)
  • We add any other external libs requested by the user (extLibs)
  • We add a Java launcher (java/fanjarlauncher/)
  • We add the jar manifest, with the java launcher being the 'main' class, and we add a property for the user defined 'appMain' to know what is the main of your Fantom app.

Runtine:
  • The java launcher extracts the Fantom 'runtime' into the user directory. (ex: ~/.fantom-rt)
  • Then it Starts Fantom 'fan' using the 'appMain'
  • The Fantom process out/err streams are passed through "real-time" to the Java laucher and redirected to the java System.out and System.err until the Fantom process completes.

Right now the runtime is extracted every time which is not very efficient.

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