README

Plask is a programming environment for multimedia and computational design.

  www.plask.org


- Getting Plask

For the common user, it is best to use the binary distribution provided at
www.plask.org.  If you're interested in building and running from source, the
following section should help you get started.


- Building and running from source

Plask integrates together quite a few pieces of technology, which unfortunately
makes the build process more complicated.  It is possible to do a boostrapped
build, where you only build the Plask source file, but use prebuilt object
files for Plask's dependencies.  Run the fetch_deps.sh script to download and
extract a copy of these prebuilt dependencies.  When fetching new source
changes to Plask, you will have to be aware if there have been any changes to
the prebuilt dependencies, and if so, to run fetch_deps.sh again.

For example, to build from a completely new checkout would look something like:

  $ sh fetch_deps.sh
  $ xcodebuild -project plask.xcodeproj -configuration Release -target Plask

This should produce Plask.app.  For some technical and design reasons, Plask.app
is effectively a commandline application inside a bundle.  For example, running
Plask.app/Contents/MacOS/Plask on the command line will start a Node-style REPL
loop, an interactive JavaScript shell of sorts.

Pass a filename on the command line to run that JavaScript file.

NOTE: To ease development, the Plask.app built has a symlink to plask.js in
the source.  This allows you to edit plask.js in the source repository without
having to rebuild the project.

A separate project, PlaskLauncher, creates the UI application for launching
Plask by dragging/dropping or File->Open.


- Creating standalone applications

When Plask.app is launched, it will look for a file named main.js inside of
the bundle (in Contents/Resources).  This allows you to easily create
standalone applications by copying Plask.app and putting your JavaScript source
inside of the bundle.

NOTE: When running "bundled", the current working directory will likely be
different from running Plask on the command line.  Generally this means if you
open files you should open a path relative to __dirname, which is Node's global
variable for the directory that your JavaScript file is in.


- Credits

Released under the BSD license.  Full details in the included LICENSE file.

(c) 2010, Dean McNamee <dean@gmail.com>

This software contains code and ideas from the fantastic:

Nicolas Garcia Belmonte
Thatcher Ulrich
Ryan Alexander
Marcin Ignac

Built with the fantastic:

V8 JavaScript Engine
Skia rasterization library
NodeJS
Cocoa and OpenGL
FreeImage
Syphon