AFC’s Build Process

AFC comes with an Ant build script in build.xml. This document lists the most important build targets. To run a build, you need to setup the required tools first.

To get a quick overview of all available build targets, run ant -p in AFC’s root folder. If you want to know more, I encourage you to look at build.xml. Skimming over the file and folder list first will help.

The individual components also each have their own components/xy/build.xml. Again, run ant -p in a component’s folder to see the available targets.

For consise output, run the targets with ant -q .... Otherwise you will get swamped by intermediate target logs.

Main Targets

build: is the default build target. It the .jars in build/ from the source code and updates the required external .jars in build/lib/ from their locations in the individual components.
test: builds the jars and runs all automated tests. This can take quite a while.
doc: rebuilds the documentation from scratch. You must have run test first because some of the test results are cited directly into the documentation (in the function reference, for instance). This will take a while, too. See doc-api and doc-main below for faster options.
dist: rebuilds final distribution packages from scratch. It first erases all temporary and build files and then runs a full build, including tests, checks, and documentation, but not code coverage analysis.
clean: removes all temporary build files, but not final output like doc/, build/, and dist/.
clobber: removes all build files, including final output.

Targets of Note

test-main: Like test, but skips the very time-consuming reference tests. Mainly useful as a quick smoke-test and as a prerequisite for code citing in doc-main.
doc-main: regenerates the HTML files in doc/ from src/doc/, except for the function reference. If cited elements have changed, they will be listed (so-called tripwires). If you have set jcite.differ in build.properties (to /usr/bin/diff for example), then you will see what has changed.
doc-main-accept: Like doc-main, but accepts changed citations and updates the tripwire database. Do this only after you have verified documentation around changed citations.
doc-img: updates the .png images from their dot sources.
check-deps: Checks package dependency rules. These are generated from src/scripts/components.yaml. Builds first.
check-style: Checks source code style rules. They are specified in src/checkstyle-*.xml. Includes checks for missing header or javadoc comments.
cover-corbertura: runs code coverage analysis using Cobertura. Slowish, but produces nice looking output. Like test, but instruments the product code for coverage analysis. Output is in temp/coverage/.
cover-emma: like cover-cobertura, but using Emma. Faster.