How To Build POI

The POI build system requires two components to perform a build. Ant and forrest.

Specifically the build has been tested to work with Ant version 1.5.3 and Forrest 0.4. To install these products download the distributions and follow the instructions in their documentation. Make sure you don't forget to set the environment variables FORREST_HOME and ANT_HOME. The ANT_HOME/bin directory should be in the path.

One these products are installed you will also need to download some extra jar files required by the build.

Library	Location
junit	http://www.ibiblio.org/maven/junit/jars/
xerces	http://www.ibiblio.org/maven/xerces/jars/
jdepend	http://www.ibiblio.org/maven/jdepend/jars/

Just pick the latest versions of these jars and place them in ANT_HOME/lib

On the first run the ant build system will download all the jars required by the project to build ant. If you're behind a firewall this may cause some problems. Should you need to it's possible to manually put the jars in the correct directories. These can be obtained from here:

JAR	Location
/commons-logging/jars/commons-logging-1.0.1.jar	lib
/log4j/jars/log4j-1.2.8.jar	lib
/commons-beanutils/jars/commons-beanutils-1.6.jar	src/contrib/lib
/commons-collections/jars/commons-collections-2.1.jar	src/contrib/lib
/commons-lang/jars/commons-lang-1.0-b1.jar	src/contrib/lib
/junit/jars/junit-3.8.1.jar	lib

The main targets of interest to our users are:

Target	Description
clean	Erase all build work products (ie, everything in the build directory
compile	Compiles all files from main, contrib and scratchpad
test	Run all unit tests from main, contrib and scratchpad
docs	Generate all documentation for the system
generate-records	Generate records from the XML record defintitions
generate-types	Generate types from the XML type definitions (this is for HDF).
jar	Produce jar files
dist	Create a distribution.
clean-dist	Runs clean before creating the distribution.