This will show you how to set up Eclipse, an open source IDE for just about every language imaginable. In this development environment, we'll use several plugins to make working with Vufind very easy.
Obviously, you need to download Eclipse. For the purposes of this set up, grab the Eclipse Classic version for your platform (it's at the bottom of the page).
If you don't already have a JRE installed, you'll need one. If you're not sure if you have a JRE installed, open a terminal (or command prompt) and type
java -version
You should (hopefully) get something looking like this
java version "1.6.0_06" Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment (build 1.6.0_06-b02) Java HotSpot(TM) Server VM (build 10.0-b22, mixed mode)
If your numbers are different, don't worry. You just want a JRE at 1.5 or above.
It doesn't actually matter which JRE you use, but I tend to use Sun's latest. If you need it, you can use your package manager, or download the software directly from Sun's website. You don't need the full SDK (though it's good to have if you're testing Vufind locally).
Subclipse is a great Subversion client that runs directly in Eclipse. It provides integration into the contextual menu (right-click) under Team.
To install, we need to add a third-party target site in Eclipse.
You'll be prompted to restart Eclipse. We're adding a bunch of plugins, so you don't have to do this until you're ready to start coding.
The Target Management Project “creates data models and frameworks to configure and manage remote (mainframe down to embedded) systems, their connections, and their services.” That's a bunch of fancy words to give you access to SSH/SFTP/SMB/NFS file systems in Eclipse. It's really handy for deploying to remote servers and making tweaks as needed.
The Eclipse Web Tools Platform (WTP) project “extends the Eclipse platform with tools for developing Web and Java EE applications. It includes source and graphical editors for a variety of languages, wizards and built-in applications to simplify development, and tools and APIs to support deploying, running, and testing apps.”
The Dynamic Languages Toolkit “is a tool for vendors, researchers, and end-users who rely on dynamic languages. DLTK is comprised of a set of extensible frameworks designed to reduce the complexity of building full featured development environments for dynamic languages such as PHP and Perl. Besides a set of frameworks DLTK provides exemplary Tcl, Ruby, and Python development environments ready to use out of the box.”
The Data Tools Platform Project allows you to work directly with your SQL backend from Eclipse. While you may not need this for most of your Vufind development, it's nice to have.
Note, when using DTP, you will need to have the JDBC drivers for your RDBMS.
The Graphical Editing Framework “allows developers to take an existing application model and quickly create a rich graphical editor.”
The PDT project “provides a PHP Development Tools framework for the Eclipse platform. This project encompasses all development components necessary to develop PHP and facilitate extensibility. It leverages the existing Web Tools Project in providing developers with PHP capabilities.”
Unfortunately, this is a bit more involved than the rest of the setups as the project hasn't quite released a version for Ganymede.
To help keep up with the latest code from the repository, you can create a new project with the Subversion information in it.
Now, you'll be prompted to create a new project.
For managing a local instance with the Vufind trunk with local revisions, please read the Subversion page.