The Tea Scripting Language

Tea is a scripting language for the Java environment. Go to the Tea home page for lots of aditional information.

This document contains instructions on how to install and setup Tea on your system.

Installing and Configuring Tea on a Unix Environment

The following instructions tell you how to install the Tea runtime environment. They assume a unix like environment with some GNU tools available (just "gzip" is enough). If you are working under Windows see the following section (Installing and Configuring Tea on a Microsoft Windows Environment). These instructions have been tested under Linux and Solaris. They should even work for Windows if you have something like CygWin installed (http://sources.redhat.com/cygwin/).

1. Download the latest Tea version
2. Download and install any aditional Java packages you migh need. If you are going to work with the XML module you will need a SAX parser implementation. There are several available for free. Possible examples (some we know of) are
   

   IBM XML4J
   Apache Xerces

   If you intend to access relational databases from within Tea by using the TDBC module you will need the apropriate JDBC drivers. Check with your database vendor where you can get your JDBC driver. Tea has been used in production environments with Postgresql (6.x and 7.0), MySql (3.22), Oracle (7.3 and 8i), Sybase, Informix, SQL Server.

3. Unpack the Tea tar ball where you want the Tea package installed. Do as follows:
   cd wherever-you-want-to-install
   gunzip -c tea-3.xx.yy.tar.gz | tar xvf -
4. Setup the installation by running the "setup" tool. The "setup" tool can be found in the "bin" directory at the root of the instalation tree. This is needed to configure the Java Runtime Environment to use and the Java libraries needed by the Tea runtime (e.g. JDBC drivers, SAX parsers).

   The "setup" tool accepts the following options:

   --java-home=PATH
   Specifies the base dir of your Java instalation. The PATH is supposed to refer to a directory containing a "bin" directory with the a "java" program. If this option is not specified then its value is taken to be "/usr".

   --jre=COMMAND
   Specifies the comand that will execute a Java program. It must recognize the "-D" and "-classpath" options. If this option is not specified then its value is taken to be "$PATH/bin/java" where PATH was specified through the "--java-home" option.

   --classpath=PATH_LIST
   Specifies the Class Path needed to run the Tea interpeter. If your Java environment needs any aditional libraries you should specify them here (e.g. Kaffe 1.0.x needs "Klasses.jar"). If you are going to use the XML or TDBC modules then you should also specify here the libraries for your SAX parser and JDBC drivers.

   As an example, supposing you have a Kaffe instalation under "/usr" and IBM's XML4J at "/usr/local/xml4j-2.0.11" you would do as follows:

   cd wherever-you-want-to-install/tea-3.xx.yy
   ./bin/setup --java-home=/usr --classpath=/usr/share/kaffe/Klasses.jar:/usr/local/xml4j-2.0.11/xml4j.jar

5. You will probably want to run the Tea shell ("bin/tsh") just by writing "tsh" at the command prompt. To achieve that it will suffice to add "wherever-you-installed-tea/tea-3.xx.yy/bin" to your PATH.

Installing and Configuring Tea on a Microsoft Windows Environment

To run the Tea interpreter under Windows you will need to have a Java virtual machine installed on your system. You can download one for the Windows environment (95, 98, 2000, NT4). After installing it (if you had not one already installed) follow the instructions bellow in order to install the Tea runtime environment.

1. Download the latest Tea version
2. Download and install any aditional Java packages you migh need. If you are going to work with the XML module you will need a SAX parser implementation. There are several available for free. Possible examples (some we know of) are
   

   IBM XML4J
   Apache Xerces

   If you intend to access relational databases from within Tea by using the TDBC module you will need the apropriate JDBC drivers. Check with your database vendor where you can get you JDBC driver. Tea has been used in production environment with Postgresql (6.x and 7.0), MySql (3.22), Oracle (7.3, 8i), Sybase, Informix, SQL Server.

3. Unpack the Tea tar ball where you want the Tea package installed. You will again need something like WinZip to unpack the "tar.gz" file.
4. Make the necessary changes to the "%TEA_BASE_DIR%\bin\tsh.bat" file to reflect your particular instalation, where "TEA_BASE_DIR" is the directory where you installed the Tea 3 package. Just edit it with Notepad or your text editor of choice. This "tsh.bat" is the DOS batch file used to launch a Tea interpreter from within the DOS prompt. Inside you will find detailed instructions explaining what needs to be configured.
5. Add the "%TEA_BASE_DIR%\bin" directory to your path so you can just type "tsh" at the DOS prompt to launch the Tea interpreter. The "tsh" command takes as first argument the name of the file containing the code to execute. The remaining arguments are passed as command line arguments to the Tea program.

If you run "tsh" with no arguments then it will read Tea commands from the console. To test your instalation you could type the following at the DOS prompt:

c:\> tsh
echo "Hello, world!"
^Z

And you should see the "Hello, world!" string being displayed on the console. Here "^Z" means the "Control" key and the "Z" key pressed simultaneously (it signals an end of file condition from the console).

Bug reports:

Send your bug reports and requests for new features to info@pdmfc.pt