ResCaf Installation Notes
by G. Brannon Smith <brannonsmith@yahoo.com>
15 Jul 2000


DISCLAIMER
==========
This app was written and tested on a i386 Linux box with some testing on a
SPARC Solaris box. If you're on another platform... good luck. (And if
you're on a Mac, just use ResEdit). BTW I did manage to get it to run on
my mom's 200MHz 32MB Windows machine after a lot of hassle and it ran...
OK, kinda jerky though.

REQUIREMENTS
============
1. Java 1.2 or better -  available from http://java.sun.com/
   I develop with Java 1.3, but I think Java 1.2 will work.
   Not so sure about Java 1.1. In any case you will need Java2D available.

2. Swing classes - also available from http://java.sun.com/

3. Java Advanced Imaging (JAI) - available from from Sun at
   http://www.javasoft.com/products/java-media/jai/index.html.

4. ResCaf can locate the resource fork in a full MacBinary file. However,
   it can also read extracted resource forks alone which can be much smaller
   that full Mac files, depending on the size of the data fork. A utility
   for extracting the resource fork from a Mac file might be useful. I use
   `macsave` from the macutils suite on my Linux box. I don't know what else
   is available.

* JIMI classes are no longer required

I think that's it...


INSTALLATION 
============
1. Unpack the archive (I guess you already did).

2. Edit `ResCafe.sh` and `ResPresso.sh and fix the ResCafe location.
   Make sure the ResCafe.jar file is in CLASSPATH. You don't even have to use the
   shell scripts if you don't want to - non-UNIX users won't anyway and will
   have to find their own solution (May I suggest installing Linux? ;-) ).

3. Make sure ResCafe.jar, plugins and icons are under the same
   directory:

                       ResCafe/
                          |                    +------------+
             +------------+----------+         | ResCafe.sh |
             |            |          |         +------------+
        ResCafe.jar    plugins/    icons/       somewhere...
                          |  
        +-----------------+-----------------+
        |                 |                 |
SomeHandler.class    AnotherOne/      YetAnother.jar
                          |
            +-------------+----------+
            |                        |
      TheHandler.class         Support.class      


PLUGINS
=======
Also notice you can dump plugins right in the plugins dir, put them in their
own subdirs with additional classes they may need, or stuff them in jar
files (again with their helper classes). I'd be careful with this last one -
I just got it working and I don't know how well it works.

That should be it... if you have a better setup, let me know. Again,
ResCafe.sh is a shell script. If you can't use shell scripts, you'll have to
come up with something else, like a .bat or whatever you're platform uses.


ICONS
=====
Hey! Where are all the icons?

Well, the best icons to use are the ones from ResEdit, but I'm not going
to redistribute them. I suppose you could get a copy of ResEdit and
extract the icons from there with some tool - a tool that could read the
resource fork of ResEdit, display the icons therein, and save them. Maybe
I'll write one - and call it ResCaf!

Of course, some cool custom icons might be better still.


JARs of PLUGINS
===============
Above I talked about scanning plugins in jar files. However the Jar Class
Loader I used is copyrighted code from the Javaworld site. I need to contact
the author about how I can use it. Until then, I don't think I will be
including the Jar Class Loading classes in this distribution. ResCaf should
notice their absence and politely move along. To get around this, just don't
use jar archives of handler for now.

UPDATE: It looks like this feature is being added to the standard Java 
        distribution so I try to bring this back online soon...


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$Id: INSTALL,v 1.4 2000/12/12 20:43:13 gbsmith Exp $