JES 5 Now Released: New Jython, Faster, Updated Watcher, with Jython Music

Matthew Frazier is an undergraduate at North Carolina State University who contacted me this last Spring.  He was going to be in Atlanta for a couple of months and was looking for a research opportunity.  Barbara and I had just been talking about how JES needed to be updated.  I checked his references and hired him without ever meeting him.  Wow, did that work great!

JES 5 (the Jython Environment for Students) has just been released at: https://github.com/gatech-csl/jes/releases/tag/5.010.  Matthew did a great job updating our workhorse for Media Computation Python (which was originally developed in Summer 2002 and is still used daily).  JES includes a full implementation of Jython, plus support for media manipulation — libraries, help functions, and explorers for looking at individual pixels and samples. Here’s a one-screen overview of JES (click on it to make it bigger):

JES window to left with program area and command area (REPL), Watcher button for debugger, two image explorers, and one sound explorer.  Help is under JES Functions menu and Help menu.

Some of the things he did for JES 5 include:

• First, we’re on github!  Come join us in stomping out bugs and making JES even better!
• Upgrading the Jython interpreter to version 2.5, making available new language features and speeding up many user programs.  I have been working on the 4th edition of the Python MediaComp book this summer, and have introduced the time library so that users can actually time their algorithms (one of those CS Principles ideas), so I had ready-made programs to run in both JES4.3 and JES5.0.  The speed doubled.
• Adding code to JES and the installers to support double-clicking .py files to open them in JES, on all supported platforms.
• Bundling JMusic and the Jython Music libraries, allowing JES to be used with the text “Making Music with Computers” by Bill Manaris and Andrew Brown.  This is super exciting to me.  All of their examples (like these) work as-is in JES 5 — plus you can do sampled sound manipulations using the MediaComp libraries.  The combination makes for a powerful and fun platform for exploring computation and sound.  My thanks to Bill who worked with us in making everything work in JES.
• Adding a plugin system that allows developers to easily bundle libraries for use with JES.
• Fixing the Watcher, so that user programs can be executed at arbitrary speeds.  This has been broken for a long time, and it’s great to have it back.  When you’re looking for a bug in a program that loops over tens of thousands of pixels or sound samples, the last thing you want is a breakpoint.
• Adding new color schemes for the Command Window, which allow users to visually see the difference between return values and print output.  This was a suggestion from my colleague Bill Leahy.  Students when first learning return can’t see how it does something different from printing.  Now, we can use color to make the result of each more distinctive.  Thanks to Richard Ladner at ACCESS Computing who helped us identify color palettes to use for colorblind students, so we can offer this distinction in multiple color sets.

• Fixing numerous bugs, especially threading issues.  When we first wrote JES, threading just wasn’t a big deal.  Today it is, and Matthew stomped on lots of threading problems in JES 5.  We got lots of suggestions and bug reports from Susan Schwartz, Brian Dorn, and others which we’re grateful for.

Thanks to Matthew for pulling this all together!  Matthew’s effort was supported by NSF REU funding.