Overview

JACOB is built on windows machines using ANT, most commonly from inside of Eclipse. The main steps for getting a working Jacob build are:

Check out the source code or unpack the source zip file from sourceforge
Install the Development Environment
Configure the build by creating a compilation_tools.properties file.
Run Eclipse and load the project into eclipse
Open the build.xml file in Eclipse and run the default ant target

Repository Organization

Unpack the source archive zip file or check the files out of CVS into d:\jacob or some other familiar place. Source Java and JNI files are located in seperate packages from the unit tests and the samples.

The java code is in .\src.
The C++ code is in .\jni.
Code is compiled into .\release

The Servlet examples that required j2ee libraries to compile have temporarily been removed.

Development Environment

The simplest build environment includes MS Visual C++ 8.0 (Studio 2005), Eclipse 3.2 with the C/C++ module and JDK 1.4. In that situation, you would just create the compilation_tools.properties using the example build.xml as a template. All of the releases, up through 1.12, were built using Visual C++ 6.0. 64 bit builds are supported starting with release 1.11. Microsoft Visual C++ 8.0 supports 64 bit builds. so no additional tools are required.

Microsoft Visual C++ 8.0 and it's included library. (to D:\apps in my case)
Eclipse 3.2 or later from www.eclipse.org. I use the C/C++ plugin for eclipse rather than MS Visual Studio
Java JDK 1.4 (1.12 was built using 1.4.2.13) Compilation using JDK 1.5 has not been tested

Build Process

The build process is based on ANT. You can run ANT from inside of eclipse or from the command line. The ant process is driven off of a configuration file named compilation_tools.properties that describes the locations of the JDK and Microsoft C++ tools. The build.xml file in the root directory contains examples of the contents of this file.

There are two main ant targets.

"default" executes the following steps when using the default target.
- Build the Java code
- Build the jni code
- create the dll
- create jar file
"package" runs the above listed steps and then
- builds the javadoc
- builds a source zip
- builds a binary zip with the javadoc

Eclipse Java IDE

Eclipse users have to do some minor tweaks to their project if they want to use the integrated build process. This is because the unit tests are files located in the "unittest" directory while the project source files themselves are in "src" the root directory. By default, eclipse will add the entire project as source. This messes up the package naming. In addition, the build directory should be set to be the same place the ANT build puts the compiled java classes. A couple small tweaks to the build path fix these problems:

Open up the project properties and go to the "Java Build Path" properties panel.

Remove the root of the project from the build path
Add folders samples, src and unittest to the build path in the Source tab.
Exclude *.txt from each of the newly added folders.
Set the build output directory to jacob-project/release/java

Running Samples and Tests

Samples and test programs can be found in the source jar or in CVS. The programs can be run from a bat file or from inside the Eclipse IDE. The java library path variable must be set to include the directory the jacob.dll is in. The simplest way to do that is to add it as a command line option. Last Modified 4/2007