Building with Maven 2

Maven is a build tool that goes far beyond simply compiling and packaging a product. It is also able to resolve dependencies (including downloading the appropriate versions from the public repositories), to run automated tests, to launch various checking tools and to create a web site for a project. It runs on any platform supporting Java.

For systems not providing maven as a package, maven can be downloaded from its site at the Apache Software Foundation: http://maven.apache.org/download.html , this page also explains the installation procedure.

As all maven enabled projects, building Orekit is straigthforward, simply run:

mvn package

The preceding command will perform all dependencies retrieval, compilation, tests and packaging for you. At the end, it will create a file named target/orekit-x.y.jar where x.y is the version number.

If you need to configure a proxy server for dependencies retrieval, see the Guide to using proxies page at the maven site.

If you already use maven for your own projects (or simply eclipse, see below), you may want to install Orekit in your local repository. This is done with the following command:

mvn install

For other commands like generating the site, or generating the checkstyle , findbugs or cobertura reports, see the maven plugins documentation at maven site: http://maven.apache.org/plugins/index.html .

Building with Ant

Ant is another well known build tool. It is more ancient than maven and widely used. It does not provide as much features as maven (no site generation for example) but is very extensible.

For systems not providing ant as a package, it can be downloaded from its site at the Apache Software Foundation: http://ant.apache.org/bindownload.cgi . The installation procedure is explained in the on-line manual .

The build file for ant is in fact automatically generated when we create a release for Orekit. It uses a configuration that is based on the maven configuration and mimics maven behaviour.

Compiling is done by running the command:

ant

Just as maven does, this command also retrieve the dependencies from public repositories, compiles the sources and creates a file named target/orekit-x.y.jar where x.y is the version number.

If you need to configure a proxy server for dependencies retrieval, see the Proxy Configuration page in the ant manual.

Building with Eclipse

Eclipse is a very rich Integrated Development Environment (IDE). It is a huge product and not a simple build tool.

For systems not providing eclipse as a package, it can be downloaded from its site at the Eclipse Foundation: http://www.eclipse.org/downloads/ .

The Orekit distribution already contains a .project and a .classpath files that can be used by Eclipse. So the simplest way to use Orekit with Eclipse is to unpack the distribution inside your Eclipse workspace and to create a new project from existing sources.

There are chances that Eclipse will try to compile the project immediately after project creation and fail because of missing dependencies. This is due to the Java build path configuration already present in the .classpath file that probably won't match your local settings. It can be fixed by editing the Java build path configuration (select Build Path/Configure Build Path in the package explorer menu, and select the Libraries tab). You will see that the configuration uses a M2_REPO variable to point directly from Eclipse to the local maven 2 repository, this variable is used for both the junit test library and the commons-math mathematical library.

If you also want to use both maven2 and eclipse, it is sufficient to set the M2_REPO variable to your own local repository (typically /home/your-username/.m2/repository on Unix, GNU/Linux and Mac OS X, and C:\Documents and Settings\username\.m2 on Windows). If you want to use Eclipse only, put the dependencies wherever you want and configure Eclipse accordingly, with or without a user variable.