plumpmath / topherizer

Preprocessor from Clojure into MaxMSP's Java configuration file format

topherizer

Topherizer is a Java console application for generating the max.java.config.txt file, which Max's Java users have, for the last eight years, been painstakingly editing by hand. Topherizer allows the configuration to be written in Clojure, with a cleaner structure, conditional "statements" and some shortcut functions.

Main wins:

• Splits sets of JAR files into separate collections, each with its own declaration
• Allows different sets of declarations to be included, or excluded, by means of conditional tests
• Allows groups of similar declarations to be grouped with a common prefix, rather than duplicating large sections of the text
• Supports arbitrary pre-processing on its input: use flags to move declarations between the system and dynamic class loaders, verify that JAR files exist, and so on

(It is arguable whether, at first glance, Clojure is an improvement as an input format. Editing Clojure in a conventional text editor is a fiddly procedure, but there are editors like Emacs (with Sam Aaron's emacs-live) which make the procedure much more efficient.)

Usage

Download the standalone "uberjar" from the downloads page. Run it on the command line with

java -jar topherizer-1.0.0-standalone.jar [input] [output]

where input is the input (Clojure) file and output is max.java.config.txt, presumably in the Cycling '74/java directory. (Back up the old one first!)

As a shortcut, if a single argument is provided, as in

java -jar topherizer-1.0.0-standalone.jar [file]

then the output file is named after the input file, but with any extension removed and replaced by .txt.

Tutorial

For the actual Clojure markup used as input, see the tutorial.

Building

Topherizer is a conventional Leiningen project; all dependencies are downloaded and linked in the conventional manner.

License

Copyright © 2012 Nick Rothwell

Distributed under the Eclipse Public License, the same as Clojure.