Building betterFORM

This page describes how to build betterFORM Core and Web. To update betterFORM running within eXist see ‘deploying a dev version to eXist’.

betterFORM uses Apache Ant as its primary build tool. All dependencies are kept in a central location in the file ‘build.properties.xml’ which is found in the root of the source tree.

In addition to Ant there is support for Maven 2.x. However the Maven files are not maintained by hand but generated from build.properties.xml. The Maven pom files can be used directly with some IDEs like JetBrains IntelliJ.

All build products are created in a directory named ‘target’ that is created in the root directory of the respective module e.g. when executing ‘compile’ for module ‘core’ the compiled classes will be in BETTERFORM_HOME/core/target. If the ‘target’ directory does not exist it is created.

To build a module it is sufficient to cd into the respective directory and call Ant:

>ant

This will execute the default target which will create the artifacts for this module.

Building the core

Build file: $betterFORM_HOME/core/build.xml

Ant Target	Description
clean	delete the ‘target’ directory of the current module
prepare	creates ‘target’ directory if needed and copies all resources to it.
compile	Compile Java classes of the module to ‘target/classes’
distribute	creates binary and source distributions
distribute-binary	creates an archive with the compiled classes, all dependent libraries and a config file
distribute-sources	creates an archive of the source tree
package	creates a jar-files of all betterFORM classes
distribute	Create a distribution version of the current module.
doc	creates JavaDoc files
test	execute all test of the current module

Building the web application

Build file: $betterFORM_HOME/web/build.xml

Ant target	Description
clean	cleans the ‘target’ directory
prepare	prepares the ‘target’ directory + copies resources
compile	compiles all Core and Web classes
create-single-jar	compiles all classes and packages them along with all resources (CSS, JavaScript, images and XSLTs) into a single jar file. The jar will contain the compressed and optimized version of the JavaScript files.
create-war	creates a web application archive (.war) for deployment in your web container
deploy	creates a webapp structure in ‘target’ along with all needed config files using the optimized single-jar
deploy-exploded	creates a webapp structure in ‘target’ as the ‘deploy’ but using the uncompressed JavaScript files for debugging purposes.
deploy-forms	copies all files from resources/main/src/xforms to the webapp structure in ‘target’.
deploy-test-resources	copies the XForms 1.1 Test Suite files to the webapp structure
doc	create JavaDoc for the web classes

Building Zaphod

tbd.

Creating an installer

tbd.