Check Out And Build

Here is how to obtain the latest version of MathPiperIDE and build it:

1) Make sure you have the Apache Subversion client application installed on your computer. Subversion is the source code version control system used to manage the MathPiper code. Subversion has a server part and a client part, but you will only need to install the client part in order to obtain (or "check out") a copy of MathPiperIDE from the MathPiper Subversion repository. The repository is what the server part of Subversion maintains and it contains one central copy of the MathPiper source code. The Subversion client application can be obtained from http://subversion.apache.org .

2) Go to the source page of the MathPiper project site: http://code.google.com/p/mathpiper/source/checkout and follow the instructions there for checking MathPiperIDE out of the repository anonymously.

3) Make sure that you have Java JDK 6 installed. When most people install Java, they install the JRE, which stands for Java Runtime Environment. The Java JDK is the Java Development Kit and it includes a copy of the JRE plus extra tools like a Java compiler. For Windows, the Java JDK can be obtained from http://java.sun.com/javase/downloads . Linux users can install OpenJDK or Sun's JDK. Mac users can search the Apple website for instructions for installing the JDK. You can test to see if the JDK was properly installed by typing "javac" at the command line in a shell. If you receive usage information instead of an error message which indicates that javac was not found, then the JDK was probably installed correctly.

4) Make sure that you have Apache Ant installed. Ant is an application build tool for Java and it can be obtained from http://ant.apache.org . Ant takes source code and uses it to build an application.

5) Open a shell and change into the topmost directory of the MathPiper files you checked out of the repository in step 2. This topmost directory will have a file called build.xml in it and this file contains instructions for Ant which tell it how to build MathPiperIDE. Type

ant *all

to build MathPiperIDE. During the build process, a directory called "build" is created in the topmost directory you checked out and the application is built inside of this directory.

6) After the build has completed, change into the build/mathpiperide directory and launch MathPiperIDE with the win_run.bat or unix_run.sh script that is in there.

7) Now that you have a copy of the MathPiper source code on your computer, you can update it to the latest version by typing the following command in the topmost directory of the MathPiper code you checked out:

svn update

This command tells the Subversion client to download the latest code that has been added to the repository and it will result in you having the latest version of MathPiper. After the update is finished, go back to step 5 in order to build the MathPiperIDE application.