Development

This page gives some detail about how to build the HiveBoard from the sources, thus allowing developers to customize it for their own needs or test their patches for bugs fixing before submitting them to the project for formal integration to HiveBoard source code.

Build HiveBoard

First of all, you have to install the el4ant build system (I suggest you install it on a directory named "hivemind-dev", as I did). Unfortunately, it looks like el4ant has been abandoned by its author although it still needs some improvements. That's the reason why I have added my own patches to the latest el4ant source (Rev. 373) . You can find my patches in file doc/el4ant-hiveboard.patch.

Add a new entry to your PATH environment variable to point to hivemind-dev/ant/bin. Make sure that you have JDK 5 in your path too (Note: starting with 0.5.0, JDK 5 is the minimum version required to build and run HiveBoard)). Make also sure that the JAVA_HOME environment variable is defined and points to your JDK 5 directory.

Then you have to extract the HiveBoard source distribution under this directory (it will automatically be named "hiveboard").

Make sure you have all the required libraries in hivemind-dev/hiveboard/lib (check out the readme.txt file in this directory). It is strongly advised to download the distribution of HiveBoard 3rd party libraries to make sure you have everything with the right versions (except the MySQL JDBC driver that cannot be part of that distribution for licenses reasons).

From a shell (Unix) or a Command prompt (Windows), change to hivemind-dev/hiveboard directory and type:

ant -f bootstrap.xml [only at first time install]
ant compile jars create.wars

This will build all HiveBoard modules. jars can be found in hivemind-dev/hiveboard/dist/lib and wars in hivemind-dev/hiveboard/dist/j2ee.

If you want to have a list of all available ant targets, just type ant -p. Many targets are provided by the el4ant build system, some are provided by additional plugins (written for specifically for the HiveBoard project). For more info on "basic" el4ant targets, please refer to el4ant documentation.

Build HiveBoard using Eclipse

Thanks to the el4ant build system, you now can generate Eclipse setup for all HiveBoard modules out of the box!

As soon as you have built HiveBoard once (as described previously), you will be able to use Eclipse to work with HiveBoard source code. For this, you will need to follow the simple steps below:

Launch Eclipse ;-)
Set the workspace directory (menu File->Switch Workspace...) to hivemind-dev/workspace
Import all HiveBoard modules (menu File->Import..., option "Existing projects into Workspace", then "Select root directory", "browse...", select hivemind-dev/hiveboard directory, all HiveBoard modules will be listed and selected by default, remove selection of hiveboard.initdb module which is not a real source module, then "Finish")
That's all!

If you want to use CheckClipse to run CheckStyle controls on HiveBoard source code, you'll additionnally have to:

Install the CheckClipse 2.1 plugin in your Eclipse plugins directory
Setup CheckClipse as described in the el4ant documentation

Note: due to some bugs in el4ant Eclipse support, you'll have to manually disable CheckClipse controls for tests modules (CheckStyle control is disabled for these modules under el4ant build system).

Disclaimer: I use Eclipse 3.2 with CheckClipse 2.1. I never tested the steps above with any other versions.