Downloading and installing JStyx

The process of installing the JStyx software (which includes the Styx Grid Services software) is very simple on all platforms. In summary:

  • Install a Java runtime environment and add the java program to your PATH.
  • Download the JStyx distribution and unpack it.
  • Set the JSTYX_HOME environment variable and add JSTYX_HOME/bin to your PATH.
You can either follow the instructions below or just go straight to the downloads page if you are impatient! ;-)

1. Set up Java

JStyx is a set of Java classes and so we need a Java runtime environment to run the software:

  1. Download and install a Java runtime environment version 1.4.2 or above from here.
  2. Add the bin directory of the Java installation to your PATH environment variable.
  3. Test this by opening a new terminal window or command prompt and typing java -version. The version number of the Java installation should be printed to the console. This should work from any directory on your system.

2. Install JStyx

The JStyx software is essentially the same on all platforms because it consists of a set of platform-independent Java libraries. The only difference between the different distributions is the scripts that are used to launch JStyx programs (these scripts are .bat files under Windows and shell scripts under Unix and are found in the bin/ directory of the distribution).

Windows

  1. Download the software in zip format from here.
  2. Unzip the software into the directory of your choice (e.g. C:\JStyx).
  3. Set the environment variable JSTYX_HOME to the location of the JStyx software (e.g. C:\JStyx).
  4. Append the directory %JSTYX_HOME%\bin to the PATH environment variable.
Note: to set an environment variable in Windows, right-click on "My Computer" and click the "Advanced" tab. Click on "Environment Variables". A Google search will reveal more information if you need it.

Unix/Linux

(Note: these instructions might also work on Mac OSX, but this hasn't been tested yet.)

  1. Download the software as a gzipped tar archive from here.
  2. Unpack the software into the directory of your choice (e.g. cd /home/jon/JStyx; tar xzf jstyx-0.2.0-unix.tar.gz).
  3. Set the environment variable JSTYX_HOME to the location of the JStyx software (e.g. export JSTYX_HOME=/home/jon/JStyx).
  4. Append the directory $JSTYX_HOME/bin to the PATH environment variable (e.g. export PATH=$PATH:$JSTYX_HOME/bin).
If you use the C shell you can set an environment variable like this: setenv JSTYX_HOME /home/jon/JStyx.

Add the JSTYX_HOME and PATH environment variables to your startup scripts so that you do not have to set them every time you want to run the JStyx software.

3. Test the installation

To verify that your installation is working, open a new terminal window (or command prompt) and enter SGSRun with no arguments. If all is well, you should just see a usage message: 

Usage: SGSRun <hostname> <port> <servicename> [args]

If you get an error message saying that the SGSRun program cannot be found, you have not set your PATH correctly. If you get an error message saying "NoClassDefFoundError" you have not set your JSTYX_HOME environment variable correctly.

Access to source code

You can get a source distribution from here. The build-instructions.txt file in this distribution contains instructions on how the software can be built from this source.

If you want the very latest version of the source code (bearing in mind that it probably will not have been tested properly, if at all!) you can get the code from Sourceforge's Subversion server at https://svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/jstyx/trunk/core. Anybody can download the entire code base, but only developers can check changes back in.