Thingamablog Blog

I Built Thingamablog from Source

Just for grins I built Thingamablog from source code. Since it is written in java, the build script is written for "ant".

Ant is a program like "make" which accepts an input file that describes the program and how to build it, and then it makes sure that everything gets built properly and stored in the right places. The old makefile's were a nightmare to deal with. Ant uses a file called "build.xml".

So first you have to get "ant" from somewhere. You can download it from

http://ant.apache.org/ 

If you are running on Windows, download the installer and follow the directions. I have done that, but I don't remember the details right now.

I am running Thingamablog on Linux here at home, and I installed ant using the package manager. Ant is a small program and will not take long to install.

BTW, ant is written in Java as well.

Once you have ant installed, download the Thingamablog source file, thingamablog-1.1b6-src.zip, put it into some directory or other and unzip it. That will result in having the directory called thingamablog-1.1b6, which is full of the source code.

Open a command window and cd into the directory thingamablog-1.1b6 and you should see a file called build.xml. That is the default build file for ant. Just type in "ant" and wait.

[brian@localhost thingamablog-1.1b6]$ ant
Buildfile: build.xml

init:
[mkdir] Created dir: /home/brian/blogtest/thingamablog-1.1b6/build
[mkdir] Created dir: /home/brian/blogtest/thingamablog-1.1b6/build/classes
[mkdir] Created dir: /home/brian/blogtest/thingamablog-1.1b6/build/app/thingamablog-1.1b6
[mkdir] Created dir: /home/brian/blogtest/thingamablog-1.1b6/build/dist
 [echo] Initializing

 ------- lots of stuff goes by -----------------
 
BUILD SUCCESSFUL
Total time: 5 seconds
[brian@localhost thingamablog-1.1b6]$

The zip files with the compiled Thingamablog in them are left in the directory, thingamablog-1.1b6/build/dist.

Notice the time.... 5 seconds!

That's it.