QDL

The QDL programming language

QDL (pronounced "quiddle") is a functional programming langugage that operates on aggregates (called stems) and also has programming control structures. As such, it is more of an algorithmic notation that happens to run on computers.

Installing QDL

You can get the qdl installer jar directly from GitHub. To use, simply invoke

java -jar qdl-installer.jar install -all -dir $QDL_HOME

where $QDL_HOME is the directory you wish it installed to. (We suggest /opt/qdl). A useful command line option is --help which will print out help and instructions. You should set $QDL_HOME in your environment and add $QDL_HOME/qdl/bin to your PATH variable to be able to run qdl directly.

If you are upgrading to another version of QDL, issue

java -jar qdl-installer.jar upgrade -all -dir $QDL_HOME

If you are just using QDL, the rest of this document may be ignored.

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Using QDL as a dependency.

The base QDL jar is in Maven and should be referenced as

<dependency>
  <groupId>org.qdl_lang</groupId>
  <artifactId>language</artifactId>
  <version>1.6-QDL-SNAPSHOT</version>
</dependency>

(Or whatever version you want.)

Building

Should you want/need to build QDL directly, you should follow these instructions. generally though that is not required and the latest version should be all you need.

System Requirements

• Java 11
• Maven 3.6 or higher

Environment Variables

• NCSA_DEV_INPUT = The root directory for sources
• NCSA_DEV_OUTPUT = The target directory for all artifacts
• NCSA_CONFIG_ROOT = Location of sensitive configuration

The NCSA_CONFIG_ROOT contains files with information that should not be committed to GitHub such as your local database password etc.

How to build it

By building it, I mean a complete recompile and the creation of artifacts suitable for release. Get the sources from GitHub and clone to 'NCSA_DEV_INPUT'. You should then be able to build the system by issuing

./build.sh

from the top-level of the checkout. Note that this will reference the variables you have set, so be sure they are correct!

Output

The output will be in NCSA_DEV_OUTPUT/qdl and will consist of the new directory, qdl which contains the distribution and the installer, qdl-installer.jar.

Note that building against a release is probably the best way. You can check out from the main branch and try to build against the snapshot release, but you should be prepared to get other dependencies (such as the NCSA security library) and build those.