POACH

poach packages nashorn projects into executable jar files.

poach --name my_app # Creates ./dist/my_app.jar

poach makes a few assumptions about your project's layout.

1. Your project lives in its own directory, and all files not ending in ".coffee" or ".java" within that directory should be packaged into the executable.
2. Any jars you depend on live in the jars/ folder within your project's root.
   • The contents of these jars are extracted into the executable.
3. The dist/ folder is reserved for the output of the poach command, and so may be emptied when poach executes.
   • Note that if dist/ does not exist, poach will create it.
4. Your project contains a main.js file at its root, which will be loaded when the executable is run.

As long as your project satisfies these expectations, poach will build your project into an executable jar file. This is accomplished by packaging the project with a built-in NashornMain class whose main method will simply load your main.js file. Apparently I just stuck the compiled version of that class into this project a few years back, and the source code is nowhere to be found. Cool! Should be trivial to rewrite if need be.

|- Project/       # The root of your project
   |- dist/       # Poached jar files will end up here
   |- jars/       # Any jar dependencies should be here
   |- com/        # May contain additional .class file dependencies
   |- main.coffee # This file will be ignored. It's for your benefit only.
   |- main.js     # When the jar file is run, this script is loaded
   |- ...         # Any other files or directories required for your app

For nashorn to load your scripts correctly once packaged in a jar, you'll need to make sure you're referencing them from the classpath. For example, if your project contains a script file under path/to/script.js, your main.js file would load it with the following command:

load('classpath:path/to/script.js')

The main feature of poach is to package your nashorn app into a jar. This jar will hold not only your scripts, but the contents of any jars you depend on, which can amount to a lot of files. So, if you to extract the contents of your jar to make a quick change to your scripts before repacking it, you would probably see a mess of files rather than your nice clean project structure. Since this is one of the main selling points of working with a scripting language in the first place, poach has a few commands to make this simpler.

To see the available commands, simply run poach help

Commands:
  poach OPTIONS                # Make executable jar from current directory
  poach extract app.jar regex  # extract all files from jar matching the regex
  poach help [COMMAND]         # Describe available commands or one specific ...
  poach update app.jar glob    # update jar with all files matching the glob

poach extract takes the name of your jar, and a regex. This will extract any files in the jar with a path that matches the provided regex. In the following example, I've extracted all Javascript and FXML files from a packaged application:

C:\equipment-simulator-gui\dist>dir
09/26/2014  07:53 AM           718,239 equipment-simulator-gui.jar
               
C:\equipment-simulator-gui\dist>poach extract equipment-simulator-gui.jar ".*\.(js|fxml)"
Running: jar xf equipment-simulator-gui.jar equipSimController.js
Running: jar xf equipment-simulator-gui.jar fxml/equipSimView.fxml
Running: jar xf equipment-simulator-gui.jar lib/EventEmitter.js
Running: jar xf equipment-simulator-gui.jar lib/fileUtils.js
Running: jar xf equipment-simulator-gui.jar lib/fx.js
Running: jar xf equipment-simulator-gui.jar lib/fx_table.js
Running: jar xf equipment-simulator-gui.jar lib/reconMib.js
Running: jar xf equipment-simulator-gui.jar lib/underscore.js
Running: jar xf equipment-simulator-gui.jar main.js
Running: jar xf equipment-simulator-gui.jar settingsLoader.js
Running: jar xf equipment-simulator-gui.jar SimulatorEventHub.js

C:\equipment-simulator-gui\dist>dir
09/25/2014  06:17 PM           718,239 equipment-simulator-gui.jar
09/25/2014  06:15 PM            15,261 equipSimController.js
09/26/2014  07:46 AM    <DIR>          fxml
09/26/2014  07:46 AM    <DIR>          lib
09/25/2014  06:16 PM               392 main.js
09/25/2014  06:15 PM             2,125 settingsLoader.js
09/25/2014  06:15 PM             2,409 SimulatorEventHub.js

You can see that all files ending in .js or .fxml were extracted from the jar, even if they're in subdirectories.

poach update takes the name of your jar, and a ruby-style file glob (with support for **). (Note that this is a little incongruent with poach extract, which uses regexps.) It will then update the jar with all files on the file system matched by the provided glob. In the following example, I've repacked an app (the equipment-simulator-gui) after making changes to the scripts.

C:\equipment-simulator-gui\dist>poach update equipment-simulator-gui.jar '**/*.{js,fxml}'
Running: jar uf equipment-simulator-gui.jar equipSimController.js
Running: jar uf equipment-simulator-gui.jar lib/EventEmitter.js
Running: jar uf equipment-simulator-gui.jar lib/fileUtils.js
Running: jar uf equipment-simulator-gui.jar lib/fx.js
Running: jar uf equipment-simulator-gui.jar lib/fx_table.js
Running: jar uf equipment-simulator-gui.jar lib/reconMib.js
Running: jar uf equipment-simulator-gui.jar lib/underscore.js
Running: jar uf equipment-simulator-gui.jar main.js
Running: jar uf equipment-simulator-gui.jar settingsLoader.js
Running: jar uf equipment-simulator-gui.jar SimulatorEventHub.js
Running: jar uf equipment-simulator-gui.jar fxml/equipSimView.fxml

Note the use of single quotes, which prevents the shell from expanding the glob, so that it can be interpretted by poach.

To install and run poach, you must have the gem and jar commands installed on your system. Usually you'll have both of these already if you have a working installation of Ruby and Java.

From rubygems

gem install poach

Or, from source

gem build poach.gemspec
gem install poach-[CURRENT.VERSION.NUMBER].gem

(The MIT License)

Copyright (c) 2014

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the 'Software'), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED 'AS IS', WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.