How to use the tclJBlend package

Before starting..

What you need:

Of course a Tcl interpreter : tclsh or wish, or even tclkit (see note below for valid versions)
(optional, yet recommended) A JavaVM: just a JRE, a JDK is not required.

Supported Tcl versions are 8.5.X and 8.6.X (and further ..) , excluding Tcl versions from 8.6.1 to 8.6.5> ( see Ticket 07d13d99b0 for full details).

About the JavaVM, you can use any JRE already 'present' on your system ; it's not required JRE be 'installed' i.e. you don't need java.exe be in PATH, nor other special variable such as JAVA_HOME need to be set (nor the JRE need to be registered in the Windows Registry').

Download JBlend or JBlend+JVM

Download from Sourceforge the last public release. You can choose among the following variants:

JBlend-2.x.zip - a multiplatform package (Win/Mac/Linux). It requires an external JRE.
JBlend+JVM-win-x64-2.x.zip - JBlend plus an embedded JVM for Windows x64
JBlend+JVM-linux-x64-2.x.zip - JBlend plus an embedded JVM for Linux x64
JBlend+JVM-darwin-x64-2.x.zip - JBlend plus an embedded JVM for MacOS x64

Please note that the os (win/linux/darwin) and the architecture (x32/x64) of the JBlend+JVM distro must match with the os/architecture of your Tcl Interpreter, and so the os/architecture of the optional, external JVM you choose to 'link' to JBlend.

Install and configure

Unzip the downloaded package and place it as a subdirectory of one of the Tcl 'lib' directories. Alternatively, you can leave it 'out of Tcl' (e.g. in a temporary directory just for testing), provided later you tell Tcl where JBlend is placed.

If you downloaded and installed (unzip) a JBlend+JVM distro, you are ready to run,
otherwise you should tell JBlend where your JRE is located, or more precisely, where the Java dynamic library jvm.dll ( or libjvm.so (Linux) or libjvm.dylib (MacOS) ) is located.
There are two ways to configure JBlend, as explained in the next section.

Configuring JBlend

You can skip this section if you downloaded JBlend+JVM, or if you are not interested in using an external JRE

There are two ways to configure JBlend, that is, to link JBlend with an external JRE:

On-fly configuration

In a running Tcl interpreter, before loading the JBlend package, set the global variable ::JBlend_JVM pointing to the jvm.dll (or libjvm.so ...).
Example:
```
 # always specify pathnames in Unix notation.
set ::JBlend_JVM Z:/myJRE/lib/amd64/server/jvm.dll
....
package require JBlend 2.1
```
Hard-coded configuration

Edit the JBLend/JVMcfg.tcl file (if it does not exist yet, copy JBlend/__JVMcfg.tcl to JBlend/JVMcfg.tcl) and insert the full pathname of jvm.dll (or libjvm.so ...). You can read detailed instructions within the file itself.

Now you are ready to run ..

Running JBlend

Once you properly installed and (optionally) configured JVMcfg.tcl, you just need

   # Uncomment and adapt the following line if JBlend is not placed in a directory
   #  referenced by the auto_path variable.
   #
   # lappend auto_path ...where-is-JBlend..
   #
   package require JBlend

....

that's all!

Note that even if the special global variable ::JBlend_JVM is hard-coded in the configuration file JBlend/JVMcfg.tcl, if you set this variable somewhere before loading the JBlend package, this new value takes the precedence over the hard-coded configuration.
If you want to be sure to use the hard-coded configuration, unset the variable before loading the package

Based on TclBlend Copyright © 1994-1998 Sun Microsystems, Inc.

JBlend is Copyright © 2016 - Irrational Numbers.