Pustefix-Framework

Before we can get started, you have to make sure that some requirements are met by your development environment. You will need:

The installation of these tools (except Tomcat) is not covered by this tutorial. Please refer to the documentation provided with these tools for installation instructions.

If you are not using Eclipse, you can just create an empty directory that will contain the project files and proceed with Section 1.3, “Unpack the skeleton”.

Start the Eclipse workbench and create a new project of type Java Project". Make sure that you choose separate source and build folders: Use src for the source and build for the build folder. This is important because the Pustefix build script expects these folders.

Download the newest pfixcore-skel-X.X.X.tar.gz from Pustefix's downloads page. Unpack the archive to a temporary directory. A new directory with the name skel will be created. Copy the content of this directory to your new project directory.

Now you need to download Apache Tomcat. Choose the .tar.gz archive from the download page and place it in the lib/tomcat directory of your project directory.

After you are done with that, refresh the resources view in Eclipse to make the new files appear.

To make features like auto-completion and auto-build work, you have to import the libraries into Eclipse. Right-click on your project in Eclipse and choose "Build Path" ⇒ "Configure Build Path...". Now use the "Add JARs..." button to add all libraries from the project's lib directory.

As Pustefix generates some classes, you have to add the folder with the generated sources to Eclipse's source path. To make this work choose the "Source" tab in the same dialog you used to configure the build path and add the gensrc folder to the list of source folders.

Finally, you have to configure the path to the JAR file containing Ant. In Eclipse choose Window ⇒ Preferences. In the dialog window choose Java ⇒ Build Path ⇒ Classpath Variables. Choose New... and create a variable with the name PFX_ANT_LIB that contains the path to the lib/ant.jar within your Ant installation directory.

Within the project directory, create a file called build.properties containing two properties:

standalone.tomcat=true
makemode=test

The first property tells the build process, that we do want to run Tomcat without Apache Httpd integration. Apache Httpd integration can be useful, because static files can be served faster. However this is an advanced topic and for our purposes Tomcat alone will be okay.

The second parameter set the so-called "make mode". This flag can be set to either "test" or "prod" and will cause the editor console to appear in web pages when in "test" mode. In fact you can even make your own settings depend on the make mode, but we will take care of this later. For the moment "test" mode is just what we want. By the way, whenever you switch the make mode, you should do a complete rebuild using ant realclean && ant to make sure, all resources have been built using the same make mode.

Now run ant to perform a first build of the environment. This will create needed symlinks and initialize the environment.