DevGuide

Installing the Arcomem Framework for Development

If you want to develop the framework or modules for the framework, you need to
install it on your machine.

First you will need to install a Java JDK from
Oracle. The ARCOMEM system was tested with version 1.7.
You will also need to install Maven which you can get from
Apache.

To develop, you will want to use your favourite IDE. As the framework uses
Maven has a dependency management system, you can use that to generate the
appropriate project files for your IDE. For eclipse, from within the directory
run:

mvn eclipse:eclipse

This generates the eclipse .project, .classpath and .settings files. It
may take some time to do this at first as Maven will download all the project\'s
dependencies into a directory on your machine (~/.m2/repository), but it only
needs to do this once. Start up Eclipse and from the File menu select
Import and then Existing Projects into Workspace and select your new
directory. You should get 4 individual projects imported into your workspace:

• arcomem-framework-core,
• offline-analysis-core,
• offline-analysis-modules and
• online-analysis.

If you are developing offline analysis modules, you should (if it\'s not
obvious) put them in the offline-analysis-modules project in the appropriate
package.

If you want to examine the documentation, you can build the documentation using
the following Maven command:

mvn site site:stage

The documentation will be output into the target/staging directory. Open
index.html into your browser to view the documentation. This command will
also build the PDF version of the documentation
target/staging/ArcomemFramework.pdf. Note that due to a change between
maven 2 and maven 3, the PDF will not contain the project reports chapters if
maven 3 is used.

Building the System

To build the system you can either let Eclipse do it or you can build directly
from the command-line. To do this use the Maven command:

mvn compile

You can ensure that you clean the stuff that Eclipse is building by using

mvn clean compile

Sometime you may have issues with dependencies not being refreshed
correctly. If you encounter this try using the -U flag which will make Maven
re-check whether the dependencies need downloading (by default it only does
this now-and-again once the dependency is downloaded):

mvn -U clean compile

If you still have troubles will dependencies, try deleting the appropriate
directory in your local Maven repository ~/.m2/repository and re-running the
last command.

Creating Assemblies

Assemblies are \'Maven-talk\' for fat-jars - jars that contain all the
dependencies. The framework\'s Maven configuration (pom.xml) is already set up
to produce assemblies. To create the assemblies, you must first install the
snapshots into your local repository. From the top-level arcomem-framework
directory run:

mvn install

This will copy the snapshots into your local repository as artifacts. Now you
can use these to build the assemblies. Go into a sub-project folder
(e.g. online-analysis) and from within the folder run the following Maven
command:

mvn assembly:assembly

This will build the fat jar into the target directory within that sub-project.

Deploying Snapshots

Snapshots (as opposed to releases) are builds of the system which have not been
marked as a release. They include new code and may be unstable. However, it is
entirely possible that your code is not ready for release, yet you wish to make
a deployment so that someone else can use your code with Maven. To do that use:

mvn deploy

which will make an assembly of the sub-project and upload it to our Arcomem
Maven repository which currently resides in Southampton. Someone else can then
make use of the code by adding the dependency to their pom.xml.