Building NMA from source

Prerequisites

If you want to build the software from source code yourself, you should be somewhat familiar with Maven projects. You will require JDK 16 or higher.

The full build also requires the following programs on the PATH:

• Rscript with R packages bookdown and tidyverse (to render the user guide): https://cran.r-project.org/
• pandoc (to render the user guide): https://pandoc.org/
• jlink (should have been installed with your JDK)
• jpackage (should have been installed with your JDK)
• 7z (7zip - required on Windows only): https://www.7-zip.org/

One of the dependencies in the POM - jebl - is not available via Maven Central, and is downloaded and installed to your local Maven repository during the initialize phase of the Maven lifecycle using the scripts/installDependencies script. If you have a non-standard path for your Maven repository, you may need to adjust the script or install the dependency manually as described below.

To manually install jebl: download it from the link below:

To add the jebl jar to your Maven repository, adapt this sample command with your own directory paths:

mvn install:install-file -Dfile="/path/to/jebl-0.4.jar" -DgroupId=jebl -DartifactId=jebl -Dversion=0.4 -Dpackaging=jar

Build process

The full Maven build of NMA performs the following steps:

• shell scripts for packaging and rendering are created from templates/, adding version-specific strings, and output to scripts/
• Java classes are compiled
• sample datasets are created from test images
• the UI is launched and screenshots are taken for inclusion in the user guide
• unit tests are run
• the user guide is rendered from an R-markdown template by running the scripts/renderUserGuide script
• a runnable standalone jar file is created (output to target/standalone/)
• in Windows and Linux, the jar file is packaged with a Java runtime by running the scripts/packageAppImage script (output to target/appimage/)
• in Windows and Linux, a zip file of the portable appimage is created (output to target/)
• in Windows, an MSI installer is created (output to target/)

Run mvn install to run this full process. To build without running the screenshotting or test suite, run mvn install -DskipTests.

Run mvn test to run the screenshotting and test suite alone.

If you get an error similar to:

[ERROR] Failed to execute goal on project nma: Could not resolve dependencies for project com.bmskinner:nma:jar:2.0.0: Could not find artifact jebl:jebl:jar:0.4 in jitpack.io (https://jitpack.io) -

In MacOs, the full build process has not been tested; all steps up to jar creation should complete, outputting a runnable jar file to target/standalone/. A sample packaging script has been provided based on the jpackage documentation to generate a DMG installer (templates/packageDMG.sh), but has not been tested.

Contributing

If you have ideas for improving NMA, you are very welcome to contribute - either raise an issue in the issue tracker, or get in touch with me to discuss further (https://www.essex.ac.uk/people/skinn19306/benjamin-skinner). At present there is no formal process to bring new coders into the project since I'm the only person working on NMA.

Full dependency list

These are the other dependencies from the POM and their reason for inclusion. For exact versions, see the POM directly.