LESS for Java

Integrated this into my ant build. Works great, thanks!

Thanks for the effort, we're now using this as a filter to compile css when needed. Works really well but compile performance is 3 times slower than the ruby version running on the cygwin command line. Is this something you've seen?

Thanks for the great library! I've used it to create a plugin for Grails (http://johnnywey.wordpress.com/2010/03/02/grails-less-css-plugin/).

It's great to see the dependency on the original Ruby project rather than trying to write it from scratch ... makes it a lot easier.

Be well.

Thanks for this great project!
I have integrated your library into wro4j (an open source project used for web resource optimization for java): http://code.google.com/p/wro4j/ . The latest release (1.2.6) integrates your library! Keep up a good work!

Okay, I found a tool called Ivy which I could actually coax into downlading the dependencies. I ended up with these JARs:

* avalon-framework-4.1.3.jar
* commons-logging-1.1.jar
* commons-logging-api-1.1.jar
* jruby-complete-1.4.0RC1.jar
* lesscss-engine-1.2.11.jar
* lesscss-servlet-1.2.11.jar
* log4j-1.2.12.jar
* logkit-1.0.1.jar
* slf4j-api-1.5.6.jar
* slf4j-simple-1.5.6.jar
* yuicompressor-2.3.6.jar

However my Tomcat still gives a non-standard 404 message for any css files (I have '/*.css' mapped to the servlet), and there is absolutely nothing in the logs. Any ideas?

@Rostislav
Excellent, thanks, I'll do that straight away as I think we've had bad experiences with JRuby reliability in the past, so using Rhino will keep everyone much happier at the company. As it happens, in the meantime, I managed to figure out what the problem was anyway: I had to turn off the GZip compression we run here even though I didn't have compression enabled in LessCss (I think!); I'd removed this config from my servlet config, but the only thing that helped was disabling our main GZip compression filter:

<init-param>
<param-name>compress</param-name>
<param-value>true</param-value>
</init-param>

Anyway, thanks loads for your help here!!!

@Rostislav,

I've switched to 2.0 and Rhino, and not only does it work, but it delivers the first result much much faster. I couldn't get 'mvn install' for 'less-engine' or 'less-servlet' to run though. Thinking this was just some Maven problems, I ignored this and built it myself with Eclipse, but then started running into problems with the @import statement not working, and also the reload never working even though the CSS file has been edited. So, I just tried to run 'mvn install' again, in case I built it wrong, and I now immediately see that the Maven errors were genuine problems:

-------------------------------------------------------
T E S T S
-------------------------------------------------------
Running com.asual.lesscss.LessEngineTest
INFO : com.asual.lesscss.LessEngine - Initializing LESS Engine
INFO : com.asual.lesscss.LessEngine - The compilation of 'div { width: 1 + 1 }' took 32 ms.
INFO : com.asual.lesscss.LessEngine - The compilation of 'file:/D:/Development/DHTML/main/lesscss-engine/target/test-classes/META-INF/test.css' took 47 ms.
ERROR: com.asual.lesscss.LessEngine - Wrapped java.net.MalformedURLException: no protocol: import.css (/D:/Development/DHTML/main/lesscss-engine/target/classes/META-INF/engine.js#12)
ERROR: com.asual.lesscss.LessEngine - org.mozilla.javascript.WrappedException: Wrapped java.net.MalformedURLException: no protocol: import.css (/D:/Development/DHTML/main/lesscss-engine/target/classes/META-INF/engine.js#12)
Tests run: 3, Failures: 0, Errors: 1, Skipped: 0, Time elapsed: 0.922 sec <<< FAILURE!

Results :

Tests in error:
compileToFile(com.asual.lesscss.LessEngineTest)

Tests run: 3, Failures: 0, Errors: 1, Skipped: 0

[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
[ERROR] BUILD FAILURE
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] There are test failures.

Please refer to D:\Development\DHTML\main\lesscss-engine\target\surefire-reports for the individual test results.

Any ideas why this might be happenning?

Thanks in advance, Dominic.

Hi Rotislav,

I finnally got a chance to look into this again. I'm not going to be able to test it till tomorrow morning, but I finally got both the maven builds to pass by changing this line in 'engine.js':

var result, charset = 'UTF-8', dirname = file.replace(/[^\/]+$/, '');

to this instead:

var result, charset = 'UTF-8', dirname = file.replace(/[^\/\\]+$/, '');

Will let you know tomorrow if there are any further problems.

Hi guys!

Just a quick word to tell you that I've successfully integrated the latest Less for Java (the one using the next official Javascript implementation of LESS) into a new Grails plug-in:
http://davidmarquis.posterous.com/introducing-less-css-plug-in-for-grails

Cheers!
David

I'm trying to get this working for a maven build. Do you have any examples of the Java code that uses the compiler?

Hi guys,

Quick note to say I've integrated lesscss-engine into a plugin [1] for Scala's [2] Simple Build Tool [3].

I ran into one issue. I'm working with version 1.1.3 of Less CSS in my apps and your master branch on Github contains version 1.0.43. There's a different mechanism for escaping fragments of raw CSS that means I can't downgrade at this point.

To work around this I forked lesscss-engine to my own Github repo and published the fork on our repo server at Untyped (repo.untyped.com, lesscss-engine version 1.1.3).

It would be useful to see first party versions of lesscss-engine for a couple of key versions of Less CSS (suggest 1.0.x and 1.1.x). Would you be willing to create a couple of tags or branches on Github and push the artefacts to your Maven repo?

Best regards and keep up the great work,

-- Dave

[1]: https://github.com/davegurnell/sbt-less
[2]: http://www.scala-lang.org/
[3]: https://github.com/harrah/xsbt/wiki

Hello, I'm going to develop a simple mojo plugin to customize dojotoolkit.org claro theme (with less).

I'd like then to deploy it on maven central repo, but I've seen that the github version is newer than the version on maven main repo, and it also have a minor version.

Could you please deploy your plugin in maven repo please?

thanks,
kiuma

ps.: I could also give you the mojo plugin (so that we have not too many sources sparse!)

Hello Rostislav,
I've nearly completed my maven plugin. I'll soon put it under codehause and I need less.js be available without a custom repo.
Could you please submit the plugin ?

1) If you can't submit it may I fork it (put souce code inside the plugin) while the plugin is not available
2) If you prefer I can give you my plugin, at the only condition that you keep it OS. I don't mind for package naming.

Cheers,
kiuma

Has anyone else run into the @import issue Dominic mentions above? I'm hitting a wall here trying to figure out how to use @import without getting an error. Being able to import variables to multiple stylesheets, in my opinion, is one of the most compelling reasons to use LESS!

Hi Rostislav,

I am trying to incorporate your Less engine into JSF as a resourcehandler and as a custom component. At the moment I am a little stuck on how to get the @import working when the css is compiled server side. How could the imported css be retrieved from the JSF resources/css location and included as well?
If you need extra information or explanation, just let me know. Thanks for the Less Engine!

I'm trying to use the command line less engine to compress my less css file on a Windows box, after running the following command:
java -jar lesscss-engine-1.3.0-SNAPSHOT-cli.jar myCss.less myCss-min.css -compress
the program just stays there without producing the output, not exits. Am i doing something wrong?

At the end of the day, i want to be able to create an ant task to do this compiliation. Do you have any examples or doc reference?

Thanks.