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<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN"
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<html>
<header>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type"
content="text/html; charset=US-ASCII">
<link rel="stylesheet"
href="../css/freetype.css">
<title>An introduction to Jam</title>
</header>
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bgcolor="#FFFFFF"
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vlink="#51188E"
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border="0"
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<tr>
<td bgcolor="#06425F">
<h1 class="intro">
THE JAM BUILDING TOOL
</h1>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td bgcolor="#669999">
<a href="#what"
class="index">What</a>
<a href="#why"
class="index">Why</a>
<a href="#howto"
class="index">How-To</a>
<a href="changes.html"
class="index">Differences</a>
<a href="#where"
class="index">Download</a>
<font color="#FFFFFF">|</font>
<a href="../index.html"
class="index">Homepage</a>
</td>
</tr>
</table>
<table align="center"
width="80%">
<tr>
<td>
<h1 class=section></h1>
<h2>Table of contents</h2>
<ul>
<a href="#what">What is Jam?</a><br>
<a href="#where">Where can I get it?</a><br>
<a href="#why">Why is Jam better than Make?</a><br>
<a href="#howto">Simple Jam How-To</a><br>
<a href="#where-ftjam">Where to get FT Jam?</a>
</ul>
<h1 class="section">
<a name="what">
What is Jam?
</a>
</h1>
<p>Jam is a small open-source build tool that can be used as a
replacement for Make. Even though Jam is a lot simpler to use than
Make, it is far more powerful and easy to master. It already works on
a large variety of platforms (Unix, Windows, OS/2, VMS, MacOS, BeOS,
etc.), it is trivial to port, and its design is sufficiently clear to
allow any average programmer to extend it with advanced features at
will.</p>
<p>The main differences between Jam and Make are as follows.</p>
<ul>
<li>
<p>Jam uses ‘Jamfiles’ instead of
‘Makefiles’.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Jamfiles do not normally contain toolset-specific rules or
actions. They are thus portable among distinct compilers.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Jamfiles are a lot simpler than Makefiles to write and
understand, while providing the same functionality, and much, much
more.</p>
</li>
</ul>
<p><a href="#top"
class="index">
<img src="../image/top.gif"
width="35"
height="19"
align="right"
border="0"
hspace="0"
vspace="0"
alt="Top"></a></p>
<hr>
<h1 class="section">
<a name="where">
Where can I get it?
</a>
</h1>
<p>There are currently two versions of Jam available.</p>
<ul>
<li>
<p>The <em>classic Jam</em>, which is available, with
documentation, from the <a
href="http://www.perforce.com/documentation/jam">official Jam
homepage</a> at <a href="http://www.perforce.com">Perforce</a>,
the original Jam author.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>An improved version, named <em>‘FT Jam’</em>,
containing several enhancements (like the ability to run on
Windows 9x systems, or additional compiler/toolset support). Look
<a href="#where-ftjam">here</a> for download information.</p>
</li>
</ul>
<p>We highly recommend that you use FT Jam as it is <em>100%
backwards compatible</em> with classic Jam and can be used as a
plug-in replacement for it. The list of changes between these two
programs is available <a href="changes.html">here</a>.</p>
<p>Alternatively, FT Jam exists because Perforce hadn't the time
to update Jam in a <em>very</em> long time, and we still hope that
these improvements will be integrated back to classic Jam as soon as
possible.</p>
<p><a href="#top"
class="index">
<img src="../image/top.gif"
width="35"
height="19"
align="right"
border="0"
hspace="0"
vspace="0"
alt="Top"></a></p>
<hr>
<h1 class="section">
<a name="why">
Why is Jam better than Make?
</a>
</h2>
<p>There really are a lot of reasons, we name just a few of
them.</p>
<ul>
<li>
<p>Compiling simple things with Jam is trivial. However,
compiling complex projects (usually with complex directory
hierarchies) is still very simple.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Jam automatically scans source files for <tt>#include</tt>
statements and computes header dependencies automatically, and it
does so <em>fast</em>.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>The Jam language is simple and expressive, and lets you define
your own build rules, actions, and functions very easily, unlike
the ALGOL-like syntax of Makefiles.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Jam knows about platform-specific directory separators.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Jam is fully customizable, and easy to extend.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Jam has a tiny footprint, and is a lot faster than Make at
building large projects (independent of target build times, of
course).</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>We have already mentioned that you don't need to modify
Jamfiles in order to compile the same project with distinct
compilers and toolsets.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Jam parses all Jamfiles in a project before beginning to build
targets. It knows the full dependency graph and can do parallel
builds <em>safely</em> with the ‘-j’ flag.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Jam is compatible with Autoconf. All configuration-specific
definitions are gathered in a single file named
‘Jamrules’ that is shared by all Jamfiles of the same
project. The ‘Jamrules’ file is generally generated
by processing a ‘Jamrules.in’ template with the
‘configure’ script on Unix systems.</p>
</li>
</ul>
<p><a href="#top"
class="index">
<img src="../image/top.gif"
width="35"
height="19"
align="right"
border="0"
hspace="0"
vspace="0"
alt="Top"></a></p>
<hr>
<h1 class="section">
<a name="howto">
Simple Jam how-to
</a>
</h1>
<p>Assuming that the ‘jam’ executable is in your path (Visual Studio
developers may additionally need to set the environment for command-line building,
e.g. vcvars32.bat)</p>
<h3>Building a project</h3>
<p>Go to the project's top-level directory, then type</p>
<pre class="code">
jam</pre>
<p>If you do not already have the JAM_TOOLSET environment variable
set, JAM will display the available options. Set JAM_TOOLSET to the
value appropriate for your environment.</p>
<p>Otherwise, this builds your project's file. In case of error, it
prints the build command (compilation, link, etc.) that produced
it.</p>
<h3>Installing a project</h3>
<p>Once your project is compiled, type</p>
<pre class="code">
jam install</pre>
<p>This installs the project (on Unix-like systems).</p>
<h3>Cleaning after a build or install</h3>
<p>Simply type</p>
<pre class="code">
jam clean</pre>
<p>To clean all temporary targets, i.e., object files, libraries,
executables, etc.</p>
<p><a href="#top"
class="index">
<img src="../image/top.gif"
width="35"
height="19"
align="right"
border="0"
hspace="0"
vspace="0"
alt="Top"></a></p>
<hr>
<h1 class="section">
<a name="where-ftjam">
Where to get FT Jam?
</a>
</h1>
<p>While the official Jam 2.5 (on which the current version of
FT Jam is based) is available from the <a
href="http://www.perforce.com/resources/documentation/jam">Jam homepage</a>, we
provide our modified version in several ways.</p>
<ul>
<li>
<p><b>Through SourceForge</b><br>
Check the package named <b><tt>ftjam</tt></b> on our <a
href="https://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=3157">SourceForge
download page</a>. Currently binary packages are available for
older versions only.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><b>Through our FTP mirrors</b><br>
Check the directory <tt>tools/jam</tt> in <a
href="../download.html#mirrors">one of our mirrors</a>.</p>
</li>
</ul>
<p>The <a href="https://swarm.workshop.perforce.com/files/guest/david_turner/jam">Perforce
public depot</a> holds older versions of the FT Jam sources.</tt>.
<p>Note that we no longer provide a CVS module for our Jam sources, in
order to avoid painful synchonisation issues between the CVS
repository and the Perforce Public depot.</p>
<p><a href="#top"
class="index">
<img src="../image/top.gif"
width="35"
height="19"
align="right"
border="0"
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vspace="0"
alt="Top"></a></p>
</td>
</tr>
</table>
<font size=-3>Last update: 26-Feb-2015</font>
<table width="100%"
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cellspacing="0"
cellpadding="5">
<tr>
<td bgcolor="#669999">
<a href="#what"
class="index">What</a>
<a href="#why"
class="index">Why</a>
<a href="#howto"
class="index">How-To</a>
<a href="changes.html"
class="index">Differences</a>
<a href="#where"
class="index">Download</a>
<font color="#FFFFFF">|</font>
<a href="../index.html"
class="index">Homepage</a>
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