Michael,
I maintain Rawr and Monkeybars. Hopefully I can help here.
Our documentation and project organization is pretty behind, but they have been getting a lot of love lately. Expect to see more docs very soon (:
It does not explain (for example):
- if all required jars are included in resulting exe, possibly automatically
Rawr does this.
- if all required ruby-libs are included in resulting exe
Rawr does this, although gems need a little work. There is documentation on this in the Monkeybars wiki.
- how to define additional ruby-libs to be included
Same as above.
- if it's possible to create GUI applications
Monkeybars, a GUI framework for JRuby has numerous applications that are packaged through Rawr. Our tutorials always use Rawr.
http://monkeybars.rubyforge.org/
http://kenai.com/projects/monkeybars
- if it's possible to set an icon for the resulting exe
Yep
- how to access resources from java
Maybe I don't understand this, but this isn't Rawr's responsibility. JRuby handles this pretty well. Any jars you include will automatically be loaded on the classpath.
- how to access location of exe-file from java
Do you mean where this lands? If so, it will land in package/windows in your project.
- if it's possible to create 64-bit applications
This largely depends on Launch4J, a Java library that Rawr depends on for creating exes. However, it is not directly supported by Rawr at the moment. Is this something you need?
- how to define main class of Java project
c.main_java_file = 'org.rubyforge.rawr.Main'
This line comes built into Rawr's default generated configuration. You can set it to any class you want, however. The notation is <package>.<class>.
- if path names are relative to current dir or root-java dir
This will be executed from the directory where the main jar/exe exists.
- if it's necessary to compile java classes through this tool.
Yes! Anything inside the c.source_dirs array will be compiled JRuby or Java.
Even, if some of var- or symbol-names seem to have some useful meaning, they could also make deamons flying out of my nose.
Example: c.files_to_copy = # From where? To where?
During the next iteration for Rawr I will be documenting all of the config items. Until then I'm more than happy to field questions on our mailing list:
http://kenai.com/projects/rawr/lists
NetBeans can find and call Rakefiles, so if your JRuby application is
all in place, having those Rakefiles with rawr configuration is not
going to be "hours" of waste.As I mentioned, there is no JRuby application, it's a Java application which uses JRuby-lib for interpretation of some configuration files.
The recommended approach for doing Monkeybars development is to make a Java project. Typically we just run the rake tasks from the console. If you want to use Netbeans to do this with a java project, you'd probably need to have ant tasks that call out to rake tasks. We haven't had any demand for this, but it's certainly open for discussion.
Therefore, currently there is no rakefile. I would not try to change the Netbeans-configuration. It is not necessary / should not be necessary to integrate the jar2exe-process into the Netbeans-build. Instead, a script should be used to convert jar-delivery to one single exe.
Adding a rake file doesn't change the Netbeans config. Rawr will make a Rakefile for you when you do `rawr install` inside your project directory.
I am not aware of any Java-2-exe support for Netbeans.
Just to reiterate: Rawr is getting a face-lift on the documentation. I expect to have the docs complete in about a month for now. Until then, please hit us up on the mailing list. Rawr sounds like a great fit for what you're doing right now, but it can also do more (OSX .app files, for example). More features are coming around like applet/webstart support, Duby support, a pure Ruby main file via ruby2java, automatic gem jarring, etc.
Logan Barnett
logustus@gmail.com
http://www.logustus.com
