Developer's Information

Building JAS Yourself

Note: The JAS distribution contains cross-platform jar files which should be all you need to run JAS. Even if you intend to extend JAS yourself you should be able to just use the published APIs to write extensions without having recompile the source yourself. Consequently you should only need to rebuild the JAS source yourself if:

1. You are just curious
2. You want to change/extend the internals of JAS itself.

Building JAS

JAS is now setup to use jmk, a pure-java, cross-platform make-like utility. When you access the full JAS source tree from CVS you will also get the external libraries required to build JAS (XML libraries, JavaHelp, Swing etc.) and a version of jmk which includes some JAS specific extensions. Although JAS will run under JDK 1.1 or better, to build JAS you need to have JDK 1.4 (or later) installed on your system and included in your PATH.

To build JAS simply CD to the directory into which you extracted the CVS source files, and issue the command:

java -jar jmk.jar

This command will build the "core" JAS jar files, jas.jar and hep.jar. The easiest way to use these is to download the most recent JAS binary distribution for your platform and copy these new files into the lib directory, replacing the files already there.

To build the full release of JAS, including the standard extensions and help, you will need to do the following:

java -jar jmk.jar rel
cd Extensions
java -jar ../jmk.jar rel
cd ..
cd Help
java -jar ../jmk.jar rel
cd ..

The first command creates a release directory and copies into it the compiled version of the base JAS distribution. The second two commands build the standard extensions and copy them into the release directory. The final two commands build the online help system.

Notes:

• For extensions which require native code, precompiled and linked versions of the code for Windows, Linux and Solaris are kept in CVS. This enables you to build the full distribution without complex platform specific setup. There are system specific makefiles within the extensions directories for building the native code, but currently there is no documentation on how to use them.
• To build the helpfiles you need to have the javahelp index builder in your PATH. JavaHelp 1.1 has a bug which prevents the indexer working properly under JDK 1.3. Building the help files is not normally necessary, since if they are not found in the distribution, they will be read from the JAS web site.
• To run jas, issue the command release/jas (unix) or release\bin\jas (windows).