How to invoke ProM 6 Java (MacOSX) Package Manager?

Isabel

Hello dear community,

i have been working with ProM (5.2, 6.0, 6.1) for quite a while on MacOSX. Today I found that my 6.1 installation misses some plugins (not shown in GUI though present in packages folder).

As I just wanted to do a fresh cleanup I deleted the prom 6.1 software folder as well as the user folder .ProM61 in my home directory. I even deleted the folder .ProM there (probably left over from 6.0). Then I downloaded 6.1 and ran ProM61.jar (using automagic MacOSX JarLauncher.app). On running ProM61.jar, UITopia starts with restoring an empty workspace and only four plugins available. The user folder .ProM61 is created with an empty package.xml in subfolder packages and no plugins at all.

So I wonder:

#1 Why does ProM61.jar invoke the GUI and not the package manager even if I deleted the user folder? I have not found any possibly Java related preferences in my system configuration so far... 

#2 How can I just launch the package manager manually on MacOSX? I found a similar issue here in the forum but the proposed solution involves setting up a shell script with all appropriate .jar files in CLASSPATH on linux, and before I dive deeper into that I wanted to know if anybody out here has a more elegant solution!

Any help appreciated together with a late happy new year!

Isabel

hverbeek

Dear Isabel,

To decide whether to start the Package Manager (PM) first, ProM does not look at your ProM user folder. Instead, it looks for a certain key (org.processmining...) in your Java preferences. If it does not find this key, it assumes that ProM is started for the very first time on this machine, and will start the PM first. ProM always will write this key. Removing the keys that start with org.processmining should make ProM start with the PM.

On Windows machines, these Java preferences are stored in the registry, on Unix machines in a .java folder, but on a Mac I don't know (sorry...). My guess (don't have a Mac, so can't check) would be that somewhere there is a .java folder, as MacOSX resembles Linux in a way.

Kind regards,

Eric.

JBuijs

Hi Isabel,

If you checked the box 'update package automatically' then ProM will update the package, well, automatically.

You can always manually start the package manager en see which packages are out of date and which packages are not installed.

Isabel

As for question #2:

I managed to invoke the package manager manually with the command:

$ java -ea -Xmx1G -XX:MaxPermSize=256m -classpath ProM61.jar org.processmining.contexts.uitopia.packagemanager.PMFrame

But I still wonder why there is an explicit package manager execution file for windows but not for other platforms. Maybe you could add one for easier handling in such cases? Maybe just add a README with documentation on how to invoke the package manager explicitly on other platforms?

Isabel

Dear Eric,

thank you for the explanation! Indeed I had been looking for a .java folder, but now I found out MacOSX stores Java user preferences in ~/Library/Preferences. This folder contains the files org.processmining.contexts.plist and org.processmining.framework.plist.

However deleting them and launching ProM61.jar did not lead to (visible) execution of the PM, but I guess thats because all packages are already installed. Will ProM detect whenever new packages are available and start the PM? Or will new packages be installed automatically?

Thanks and kind regards,

Isabel

Isabel

Okay, thank you!

P.S.: I still think it would be nice to either give MacOSX/Java users an easy way to invoke the package manager or at least ship documentation with ProM6 on how to do that manually. If it were not for this forum, I'd never ever have come up with

"$ java -ea -Xmx1G -XX:MaxPermSize=256m -classpath ProM61.jar org.processmining.contexts.uitopia.packagemanager.PMFrame"

myself