Renew - The Reference Net Workshop
==================================

Renew is a high-level Petri net simulator written in Java.
This file tells you the most rudimentary information about Renew.
It should suffice to get Renew running and to extract the
full documentation from the archives.


License Terms
=============

See the file doc/LICENSE for the license terms and the disclaimers that 
apply to Renew.


Installation
============

Before you can use Renew, you must have Java 17 or higher installed. If you 
have not done this yet, we suggest that you get the latest Java Development 
Kit from Oracle (https://www.oracle.com/java/) or from Adoptium 
(https://adoptium.net/) where versions for Windows, Linux, MacOS are 
available. Renew only requries the Java Runtime Environment (JRE), but it is 
no longer distributed separately.

There are many other platforms that cannot be listed here. For the 
installation of the Java platforms, please refer to the instructions 
that come with the executables. Renew is a full Java application, not 
an applet, and it is not intended to be used from WWW browsers like
Mozilla or Internet Explorer. You must install a standalone Java.

Now the installation procedure depends on your operating system.

Apple Macintosh
---------------

From version 2.6.1 onwards, Renew requires at least Java 17.
    
Since MacOS is built upon a Unix core, 
please follow the installation directions for Unix.
To do so, open the Terminal application which can be found in
/Applications/Utilities. You may add the optional AppleUI plugin.

We provide a MacOS application bundle for download which 
can replace the Unix-style installation of Renew.
The application is configured in GUI mode using the OS X build-in 
console output and comes with the (limited) prompt capabilities of 
the GuiPrompt plugin. The application bundle comes with the Unix 
install scripts, which can be used as discribed above. These are 
hidden in the application bundle. 


Other Operating Systems
-----------------------

You should have got the file renew2.6.1base.zip. To uncompress 
the base package, issue the command

  unzip renew2.6.1base.zip

which will create a directory with the name renew2.6.1.

The jar-file renew2.6.1/loader.jar is automatically created.
That file contains the compiled Java classes of the plugin
system. It should not be unpacked, because it can be added
directly to your classpath and allows faster loading than many
unpacked files.

The functionality of Renew has been decomposed into several
plugins which reside as .jar files in the subdirectory
renew2.6.1/plugins. This is also the place where you can add extra
plugins.

For some operating systems there are special scripts that
ease the installation.

Unix and MacOS
.................

Change to the directory renew2.6.1/bin/unix and call the
installation script installrenew in a sh-shell, which will
create the necessary startup scripts for you.

  cd renew2.6.1/bin/unix
  sh installrenew

It is important that you start the install script from the 
proper directory, otherwise it cannot determine the correct
paths. Now you can use renew2.6.1/bin/unix/renew
to start Renew.

Windows
.......

In the directory renew2.6.1\bin\win you will find the
installation script installrenew.bat. First, invoke

  cd renew2.6.1\bin\win
  installrenew

to create the renew startup scripts according to your directory
structure. It is required that you change to the binary directory
first, otherwise the paths cannot be correctly determined. 
Then call

  renew

to start the editor.

Manual Installation
...................

Maybe we did not provide a shell script for your platform
or our scripts did not work. You can always start
Renew manually, which is not very difficult after all.

  java -jar some/where/renew2.6.1/loader.jar gui

will start the renew editor, if the archive was extracted to
/some/where. Depending on your system you may need to
issue a different command.

The documentation contains a few hints on alternative
commands or settings to start the application.


Source Installation
-------------------

Usually there is no need to do a source installation.
If you feel confused by this section, simply skip it.

If you want to uncompress the source package, type

  unzip renew2.6.1source.zip

which will put files into the directories renew2.6.1/src and
renew2.6.1/doc. Note that you will require a full-fledged Java
compiler, not only a Java runtime environment, to compile the
source code. If you do not have a Java compiler yet, you do not
need the source code.

To compile the sources, you will need some tools which are
listed in the file renew2.6.1/src/README. In this file you
will also find some hints on how to configure the compilation 
process.

The results of the compilation will go in the directory
renew2.6.1/src/dist. There you will find loader.jar and also a
plugins directory. To avoid confusion with the distributed
application, you should delete renew2.6.1/loader.jar and the
renew2.6.1/plugins directory of the binary distribution.


Further reading
===============

Consult the file doc/renew.pdf for more information
about the usage of Renew and the syntax and semantics of
reference nets.

Consult the file doc/architecture.pdf, if you are an experienced
Renew user and want to apply modifications to Renew.


Contact
=======

To get in contact with us, you can send an email to

  support@renew.de

regarding any aspect of the Renew tool, especially update 
notification requests, bug reports, feature requests, and
source code submissions. Our postal address is

  Arbeitsbereich TGI
    - Renew -
  Fachbereich Informatik, Uni Hamburg
  Vogt-Koelln-Strasse 30
  D-22527 Hamburg
  Germany

in case you do not have access to email. The latest
news about Renew are available from the URL

  http://www.renew.de/

and in the same place improved versions and bug fixes 
occur first.

