Beneath all of its strengths and for the sake of its cross-platform character, Java was never offered a proper integration into operating systems. In particular in UNIX, the sole way to run a Java program is to explicitely invoke the JVM with the main class of the application as an argument. Worse, for this to work, the classpath must have priorly been set by hand as pointing to the correct JAR files. In addition to this problem of poor integration, Java's API, though very rich, has no shortcuts to common operations. Then writing simple programs in Java often requires long coding.
As a consequence programmers are reluctant to use Java as a programming language for UNIX. Most often they rather opt for bash, Python, C/C++, Perl, TCL, etc.

Java4unix comes as a solution which consists in:

• on the developer side: a releasing tool that exports your application and all its dependancies to J4U online repository.
• on the user side: an installer which downloads and installs released applications on the local computer as standard UNIX applications.

• automatic versioning;
• management of the command line;
• the support of configuration files;
• an API for POSIX tools from Java;
• an general-purpose API allowing the fast-coding of common operations.

The following applications/project already make use of java4unix: lmu, grph, java4unix, miapita, drmsim, biggrph, mascsim, VinylsInTheBox, etc. ?>

Developer download

• Complete framework, including source and binaries;
• PDF developer manual;
• browsable javadoc.

  Developers will need to install java4unix on their computer. Run the following command to do this:

  curl -s http://www.i3s.unice.fr/~hogie/software/java4unix/j4uni | sh -s java4unix