Monday, January 11, 2010

JPdfBookmarks Has Gone Open Source



I'm proud to announce that JPdfBookmarks is now open source, released subject to the GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE Version 3 (GPLv3 for short) and hosted on SourceForge. The reasons for making this choice are numerous, to name only a few:
  • receiving help from the community to fix bugs and implement new features;
  • having more flexibility in the choice of the libraries the program uses;
  • using code released by other open source projects using a compatible license;
  • facilitating the distribution of the software;
  • improving programming skills receiving (constructive) criticism by other developers;
  • I make use of a lot of open source software and libraries, it's time to contribute somehow.
For the time being there is no binary package that can be downloaded by normal users, but an advanced user or a java developer can already access the sourceforge subversion repository and build the project, a small guide follows.

My development environment is the JDK 6, I use the Netbeans IDE version 6.7.1 but you can build jpdfbookmarks on the command line using ant if you prefer. Netbeans have very good subversion integration if you use this IDE I recommend it, otherwise download an appropriate subversion client for your system, I will first guide you to build the program in Netbeans and then on the command line.

From the Netbeans menu choose "Team->Subversion->Checkout" and you will get the following dialog:



 the repository url to enter is https://jpdfbookmarks.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/jpdfbookmarks/trunk then click next and you will get to the following panel:



 choose trunk as the repository folder and check "Skip "trunk" and checkout only its content", choose the local folder, for example C:\Users\username\Documents\NetbeansProjects\jpdfbookmarks, and check "Scan for Netbeans Projects after Checkout", then click Finish. Wait for the download to finish and then you get:



click on "Open Project ..." and you have:



select the project jpdfbookmarks_core, check "Open Required" and click Open.
 Run the project in Netbeans with F6 key or with the appropriate Run menu item.

If you prefer using the command line download the current source with the command:

 $> svn co https://jpdfbookmarks.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/jpdfbookmarks/trunk jpdfbookmarks 

enter the directory containing the main project with:

$> cd jpdfbookmarks/jpdfbookmarks_core

build the project with:

$> ant jar

execute the program with:


$> java -jar dist/jpdfbookmarks.jar

Any feedback of any kind is really appreciated, post comments here or at sourceforge or send me an e-mail,
thank you.

2 comments:

castawaybcn said...

I just wanted to thank you for such a useful application. And congratulations for moving it to GPL!!
Do you know about PDFSam? It is also FS, done in Java and the developers happen to be Italian too ;) Their app has a plugin system and they do not have a bookmarks editing one!
Since I am not a programmer I don't have the slightest idea of how compatible both projects may be though.

flavianopetrocchi said...

Thank you, I didn't know about PDFSam, I will take a look at it as soon as I can. Ciao.