jCAE - VTK

Introduction
Building VTK

Introduction

The jCAE project has started a migration process from Java3D to VTK. The main reason why we are giving up java3d is the lack of picking features. The viewer3d module will be replaced by a vtk-util module.

Building VTK

Getting source

Kitware doesn't provide binary distributions with Java binding enabled so you have to build VTK by yourself. The current version of vtk-util require at least VTK 5.2 and is known to work with VTK 5.3 (current CVS HEAD). Both are unreleased CVS versions. See http://www.vtk.org.

Dependencies

Here are the requirements to build VTK with Java binding:

patch. You have it in your Linux distro. There are also Windows binaries.
cmake
GNU make and gcc [Linux], or Visual Studio Express [Windows], or any other set of compilation tool supported by cmake.
OpenGL header and developer libraries
The Sun Java Development Kit

On Debian/Ubuntu system just do:

apt-get install patch make cmake libgl1-mesa-dev sun-java6-jdk

Patching

Developing jCAE we fixed several problems in VTK and made some patches. Writting thoses lines, those patches are not yet integrated in the VTK CVS repository. You may find them here: https://jcae.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/jcae/trunk/vtk-util/patch. The patching commands will look like this:

cd /a/foo/path/VTK
patch -p0 < /tmp/underscore.patch
patch -p0 < /tmp/displayList.patch
patch -p0 < /tmp/translucent.patch
patch -p0 < /tmp/offset.patch

The patch directories also include an apply.sh script which will automatically apply all patches if you have quilt installed. Just call it from the VTK directory.

Configuring and building

mkdir /a/bar/path/build-vtk
cd /a/bar/path/build-vtk
cmake /a/foo/path/VTK

This will create a default configuration file name CMakeCache.txt. To build the Java binding you have to modify it. Here is an example for Debian like distribution:

VTK_WRAP_JAVA:BOOL=ON
//Path to a program.
JAVA_ARCHIVE:FILEPATH=/usr/bin/jar

//Path to a file.
JAVA_AWT_INCLUDE_PATH:PATH=/usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun/include/

//Path to a library.
JAVA_AWT_LIBRARY:FILEPATH=/usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun/jre/lib/i386/libjawt.so

//Path to a program.
JAVA_COMPILE:FILEPATH=/usr/bin/javac

//Path to a file.
JAVA_INCLUDE_PATH:PATH=/usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun/include/

//Path to a file.
JAVA_INCLUDE_PATH2:PATH=/usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun/include/linux

//Path to a program.
JAVA_RUNTIME:FILEPATH=/usr/bin/java

Then rerun cmake ../VTK to take the change into account. Finally run make.

The building process on Windows is similar except that the CMakeCache.txt edition can be done through a GUI and that you will probably use Visual Studio instead of GNU Make/GCC.