Setting Up a MIRC Development Environment

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Revision as of 14:23, 13 December 2012 by Johnperry (talk | contribs)
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UNDER CONSTRUCTION

This article describes the development environment that was used to develop the MIRC software, including CTP and TFS. It is not the only way that it could have been done, and it is certainly not a sophisticated approach; it is just the way that I did it. The intended audience for this article is software engineers who are extending or maintaining the code.

There are three key modules in the MIRC software:

  • Util contains the embedded server, common servlets, and a collection of utility classes.
  • CTP contains the CTP application, including.
  • MIRC contains the CTP plugin that implements the teaching file system.

All the software is available on GitHub at https://github.com/johnperry.

The best approach is to fork the Util, CTP, and MIRC2 repositories and check out the code onto your development system.

Each module has an Ant build.xml file to build it. The build files expect this directory structure:

  • Development
    • Util
    • CTP
    • MIRC2

Building the Software

When you download the CTP repository from GitHub, you obtain a zip file containing a directory tree full of the sources and libraries for building the application. The top of the directory tree has a complicated name that includes the letters CTP. In the rest of this article, that directory will be called CTP. The directory contains several subdirectories. The source code is in the source directory, which has four subdirectories, one each for the default CTP configuration file, the Java sources, the files required by the application, and resources which are included in the application's jar.

Building CTP requires the Java 1.5 JDK (or better) and Ant. Running CTP just requires the JRE. If you use stages that create JPEGs from DICOM images, the JAI ImageIO Tools are also required.

The Ant build file for CTP is in the CTP directory and is called build.xml. To build the software on a Windows system, launch a command window, navigate to the root directory of the tree, and enter ant all.

The build file contains several targets. The all target does a clean build of everything, including the installer and the Javadocs.

The Javadocs can be accessed with a browser by opening the file:

CTP/documentation/index.html

The installer is located in the products directory.