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Main Content:
Documentation:
Developers Corner:
Hosted by:
This page contains information for people who intend to contribute to the development of Evolvica or
only would like to compile it be themself. Please note that the information given here is valid for the
latest release 0.6.x. This page will be updated for the next upcoming release soon.
You should be familiar with some of the tools and third-party libraries that are used by
Evolvica. First of course you should be familiar with CVS. CVS is used to host the source code
at Sourceforge. This document relates to the CVS branch branch-eclipse-3-0. If you
don't know what CVS is and what CVS branches are, stop here and start reading the CVS
documentation!
If you would like to hack the user interface you should have heavy knowledge about the Eclipse
platform and its plugin structure.
Evolvica uses Jakarta Ant as the build controller. The build works only with Ant version 1.6
or later. In addition the Ant-Contrib tasks are used.
Evolvica depends on a number of third-party libraries. Namely these are:
You do not need to go out and collect all these libraries from the internet. Below there's a developer kit available for download which contains all these libraries.
This section describes step by step how to prepare your working environment to be able to build Evolvica.
Step 1: Getting the sources from CVS
Use your favourite CVS client to access Evolvicas CVS repository at cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/evolvica. Don't check out the main trunk, use the branch branch-eclipse-3-0. This branch contains the current development version. Only necessary patches and fixes are inserted to the main trunk, the actual development takes place on the branch. The check-out will create a directory with the following subdirectories:
Step 2: Getting the Developer Kit
As already mentioned you do not need to collect the libraries Evolvica depends on by hand. Instead
download the developer kit. Copy the file into the toplevel
directory that was created by the CVS checkout and decompress it. This will create a new subdirectory
ext which contains the ant-contrib tasks and a new directory platform/noarch which
contains all the required third-party libraries.
In addition the developer kit contains project files for Eclipse. These files will be copied to the
appropriate plugin folders and you are able to import these plugins into your Eclipse IDE via
Import Existing Project into Workspace.
Step 3: Getting the Eclipse SDK
In addition to the mentioned libraries Evolvica of course requires the Eclipse SDK. You can download
the SDK here. Note that the SDK
is required - the platform alone is not sufficient! As you may already noticed: version 3.0 of the Eclipse
SDK is required.
Currently four operating systems are supported by the build process: Linux/GTK, Linux/Motif, Solaris/Motif
and Win32. The files in these packages are required to build the stand-alone versions of Evolvica. In
addition the Win32 SDK is always required for compilation, because the paths the appropriate jar files
are hardwired in the build files (for instance in the file plugins/org.evolvica.ui/build.properties.
The Eclipse SDK packages need to be extracted into the platform subdirectory in such a way that
the following directory structure is created. In addition create a new directory eclipse if you
intend to build a version of Evolvica that can be integrated into an existing Eclipse installation.
After completing the steps described above you yre now ready to build Evolvica. Running ant -projecthelp gives you an overview over available build targets:
The created versions will end up in the directory .build, whereas the directory .deploy contains compressed packages for deployment to the website. If you only require the core library, just invoke the compile-plugins target and add the classes folder from plugins/org.evolvica.core/classes to your classpath.