Setting Up a MIRC Development Environment

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

In each module's top-level directory, there is the Ant build file and several subdirectories. The source code is in the source directory, which has at least two subdirectories, one for the Java sources and one for the files required by the module. In some cases there are other subdirectories for configuration files and resources that are included in the module's jar.

For compatibility with older Macintosh users, all the modules are traditionally built on Java 1.5.

To build the software on a Windows system, launch a command window, navigate to the root directory of the tree, and enter ant all.

Each 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.