(See below for some notes for building on Microsoft Windows.)

If you have a tar.gz file, first unpack that in your build directory:

tar xzf kawa-3.1.1.tar.gz
cd kawa-3.1.1

If you’re building from the Git repository, you need to generate configure and some other files. This is easiest done with the autogen.sh script:

./autogen.sh

Then you must configure the sources. This you do in the same way you configure most other GNU software. Normally you can just run the configure script with no arguments:

./configure

The configure script takes a number of options.

If you have installed Kawa before, make sure your CLASSPATH does not include old versions of Kawa, or other classes that may conflict with the new ones.

Then you need to compile all the .java source files. Just run make:

make

This assumes that ‘java’ and ‘javac’ are the java interpreter and compiler, respectively.

It has been reported that parallel make doesn’t work, so don’t use the -j2 or above options.

You can now test the system by running Kawa in place:

java kawa.repl

or you can run the test suite:

make check

or you can install the compiled files:

make install

This will install your classes into $PREFIX/share/java (and its sub-directories). Here $PREFIX is the directory you specified to configure with the --prefix option, or /usr/local if you did not specify a --prefix option.

To use the installed files, you need to set CLASSPATH so that $PREFIX/share/java/kawa.jar is in the path:

CLASSPATH=$PREFIX/share/java/kawa.jar
export CLASSPATH

This is done automatically if you use the ‘kawa’ script.

Kawa now includes an Ant buildfile (build.xml). Ant is a part of the Apache Jakarta project. If you don’t hava Ant installed, get it from http://ant.apache.org/bindownload.cgi. The build is entirely Java based and works equally well on *nix, Windows, and presumably most any other operating system.

Once Ant has been installed and configured (you may need to set the JAVA_HOME, and ANT_HOME environment variables), you should be able to change to the directory containing the build.xml file, and invoke the ‘ant’ command. With the default settings, a successful build will result in a kawa-3.1.1.jar in the current directory.

There are a few Ant "targets" of interest (they can be supplied on the Ant command line):

There is not yet a test target for running the testsuite.

There are various “properties" that control what ant does. You can override these on the command line or by editing the build.properties file in the same directory as build.xml. For example, the build.dir property tells ant where to build temporary files, and where to leave the resulting .jar file. For example, to leave the generated files in the sub-directory named BUILD do:

ant -Dbuild.dir=BUILD

A sample build.properties is provided and it contains comments explaining many of the options.

Here are a few general properties that help to customize your build:

Here are some Kawa-specific ones (all true/false): with-collections, with-references, with-awt, with-swing, enable-jemacs, and enable-servlet> See the sample build.properties for more information on these.

If you change any of the build properties, you will generally want to do an ‘ant clean’ before building again as the build is often not able to notice that kind of change. In the case of changing a directory path, you would want to do the clean before changing the path.

A special note for NetBeans users: For some reason the build-tools target which compiles an Ant task won’t compile with the classpath provided by NetBeans. You may do ‘ant build-tools’ from the command line outside of NetBeans, in which case you will not want to use the clean target as that will delete the tool files as well. You can use the clean-build and/or clean-dist targets as appropriate. Alternatively you can add ant.jar to the build-tools classpath by copying or linking it into a lib/ext directory in Kawa’s source directory (the one containing the build.xml file).