jMax Phoenix
Rumors of the jMax demise have been greately exaggerated. Free software never die, just sleep for some time. For jMax, it has been a long sleep, but I decided to wake it up.
As I describe elsewhere on this site, I was on of the original designer of jMax, and it was one of the project where I had the most fun. When I left Ircam, for various reasons, I left the project knowing that I did not not had the time to bring it to the technically excellency I was looking for, and to develop all the ideas I originally put in the design.
Have never though of going back in the past and fix some fundamental problem in your life ? Well, with free software, you can. OK, you cannot fix your life, but you can fix the code. I don’t write code anymore in my daily job, it was time to have some serious fun in a personal project.
The time is also correct: jMax was written for an high end high performance system; at least two processors were required to run it correctly, and a high computing power; it happens today that most of the PCs have at least two core, and plenty of computing power. Now jMax can easily run and be developed on any machine. The project was also very in advance of his time in its use of Java as a portable UI environment; at the time the performance of Java was not exactly optimal, and the swing UI toolkit just a first approximation of what we have today; also, no free implementation of Java were available, thing that reduced the interest of the free software community in jMax.
What were at that time the limits of jMax, are today his strength.It can use multiple processors, it use a very reach and powerful graphic environment, and have a architecture defined for the future.
Please not that the jMax Phoenix project is a fork of the original code base and cvs, taken around the time I left Ircam. For those who know the jMax history, jMax Phoenix will start from jMax 2.4.5. Later developments will be backported if judged interesting.
I’ll use this post to trace design and coding decisions for future reference.
If you are interested, take a look to the source forge project called jMax Phoenix; you can subscribe to one or both of the mailing lists there (users, developers), and get an idea of technical work going on from the archives. If you want to know more about all this, you can also contact me directly at maurio at dececco dot name.