Building JiBX

To build JiBX, either from the distribution or from a CVS image, use the Ant build.xml file in the /build directory. The default Ant task just rebuilds the JiBX jar files with debug information included. The "testing" task rebuilds the jars and then runs a standard set of regression tests on the code. The "distrib" task builds the actual distribution zip file.

The Ant build looks for dom4j.jar and jdom.jar files in the /lib directory. If these jar file are present the build will include the classes in the jibx-extras.jar that support working with these document models. If the jars are not found these classes will be missing from the generated jibx-extras.jar. Additionally, building the JavaDocs without these jars will result in some error messages. These error messages can be ignored.

The build has been tested on JDK versions 1.3, 1.4, and 1.5. JDK 1.3 does not include the JAXP library (used by the JiBX extras code for DOM document model support) in the distribution, so to build with JDK 1.3 you need a JAXP implementation. As a convenience, the supplied build file will look for Xerces jar files in the /lib directory and include these in the classpath if the jars are present. The jar files needed for this purpose are xercesImpl.jar and xml-apis.jar.

To build the internal JavaDocs, use the Ant "devdoc" target. This will generate the full JavaDocs for all JiBX code (rather than just the user-visible classes included in the normal JavaDocs) to the /build/docs/dev directory.

If you're building JiBX within an IDE environment, you can use the Ant build-binding.xml file in the /build directory to compile the JiBX bindings used by the binding compiler itself. You'll need to recompile these bindings any time classes in the org.jibx.compiler.model package are recompiled by the IDE.