Axion: Building Axion

Overview

This document provides instructions on building Axion from CVS or a source distribution using Apache Ant. Axion can also be built using Maven. To build with Maven, simply install Maven and run maven test, maven dist, etc.

Please report any issues encountered while using a snapshot version of Axion to our bug tracking database using the version "current".

(Note that currently commons-primitives 1.0 is not available in the Maven repository. To add it manually, download commons-primitives from http://jakarta.apache.org/commons/primitives and place it at your-maven-repository/commons-primitives/jars/commons-primitives-1.0.jar.)

1. Download and Install the Java Development Kit

Download a Java Development Kit (JDK) release (version 1.6+) from http://java.sun.com/j2se/ and install it according to the instructions included with the release.

Set an environment variable named JAVA_HOME to the pathname of the directory into which you installed the JDK release.

Note that the latest development version of Axion is designed for JDK 1.6 or later.

2. Download and Install the Ant Binary Distribution

Download Ant (version 1.3 or later) from http://ant.apache.org/ and install it according to the instructions included with the release.

Add Ant's bin directory to your PATH in to make the "ant" command line script available.

3. Download and Install the Commons-Codec library

Download Commons-Codec (version 1.1 or later) from http://commons.apache.org/codec/ and install it.

The Codec package is needed to compile and run Axion.

(We'll need the path to the commons-codec.jar file below.)

4. Download and Install the Commons-Collections library

Download Commons-Collections (release 2.1 or later) from http://commons.apache.org/collections and install it.

The Collections package is needed to compile and run Axion.

(We'll need the path to the commons-collections.jar file below.)

5. Download and Install the Commons-Primitives library

Download Commons-Primitives (release 1.0 or later) from http://commons.apache.org/primitives and install it.

The Primitives package is needed to compile and run Axion.

(We'll need the path to the commons-primitives.jar file below.)

6. Download and Install the Commons-Logging library

Download Commons-Logging (release 1.0 or later) from http://commons.apache.org/logging and install it.

The Logging package is needed to compile and run Axion.

(We'll need the path to the commons-logging.jar file below.)

7. Download and Install the JUnit Unit Testing Framework

Download JUnit (version 3.7 or later) from http://junit.org/ and install it according to the instructions included with the release.

The JUnit package is needed to compile and execute Axion's unit tests. It is not needed at runtime.

(We'll need the path to the junit.jar file below.)

8. Download and Install JavaCC

Download JavaCC (version 3.2 or later) from https://javacc.dev.java.net/servlets/ProjectDocumentList and install it.

JavaCC is needed to build Axion. It is not needed at runtime.

(We'll need the path to the javacc.jar file below.)

9. Obtain an Axion DB Source Distribution

Axion source distributions can be obtained via anonymous CVS or as tar or zip files.

See the instructions at http://axion.tigris.org/servlets/ProjectSource for details.

10. Customize Build Properties

Axion has some external dependencies that are satisfied by configuring appropriate values in your build.properties file. One easy way to do this is to copy the build.properties.sample file (in the root Axion directory) to build.properties, and then edit it to suit your environment.

Alternatively, you can skip this step and simply drop the requisite JARs into the Axion lib directory. The build script will pick them up automatically.

11. Build a Binary Distribution

Open a command line shell, cd into the root Axion directory, and issue the command:

ant -projecthelp

If everything is installed correctly, you should see a list of the Ant "targets" that represent different commands you might wish to build.

To compile the source and test files, and execute the unit test suite, use the "test" target, like this:

ant test

To generate the Axion JAR file, execute the "jar" target, like this:

ant jar

Finally, the "dist" target creates a complete binary distribution. To execute it, type:

ant dist

12. Running Axion

To run Axion, you'll need commons-collections.jar, commons-primitives.jar, commons-codec.jar (if you use the BASE64 functions), commons-logging.jar and axiondb-1.0-dev.jar in your CLASSPATH. See the quick start and tools documents for more.