It is the intention of the GRITS developers that development of the GRITS project should be IDE agnostic. However, the GRITS project began life as a project using the Eclipse IDE, and therefore instructions on getting started and set up with Elcipse are the most complete. In the future we intend to add other instructions as developers find their own favorite tools for GRITS development.
CVS
We currently use CVS for our revision control needs for all of our projects, although we have plans to move to Subversion once JIRA supports Subversion. View CVS is configured for viewing our CVS repository on the web, and we use cvsspam to send email notifications for all commits to our projects. We provide an email list you can subscribe to (go to http://www-glast.stanford.edu/cgi-prot/subscribe.pl and subscribe to the Java CVS archive updates list) to receive these commit notificaitons directly, or you can simply access the email archive.
You must have a SLAC UNIX account to check out the source code from CVS and use SSH with your CVS client (we do not support anonymous pserver access). Here is an example of checking out the org-glast project:
$ export CVS_RSH=ssh $ cvs -d :ext:glast-java.slac.stanford.edu:/cvs/java co org-glast
We use CruiseControl as our build and release manager, which does automatic builds of registered project from our CVS repository. Instructions for registering projects with cruise control can be found here: Cruise Control.
org-glast
The org-glast CVS module is a suggested parent POM for GLAST Maven projects. For more information about how use use Maven, see out Maven
Toolset
The GRITS CVS module contains all of the third party jars required to build and run the GRITS web application. However, there are still some third party tools required to actually build and run GRITS, such as an installation of the JDK, the Ant build tool and a J2EE container to deploy the GRITS web application to.
The following table outlines the complete GRITS toolset. Each tool is typically composed of several jar files, which often times themselves depend on several other third-party jar files. These dependencies are described in the following sections.
Third Party Tool |
Version |
Home Page |
Required |
Included in CVS |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Java 2 Platform, Standard Edition |
1.4.2 (not 1.5 yet) |
Yes |
No |
|
Apache Ant |
1.6.1 or later |
Yes |
No |
|
1.2.1 |
Yes |
Yes |
||
2.1.4 or later |
Yes |
Yes |
||
2.1 or later |
Yes |
Yes |
||
2.0.1 or later |
Yes |
Yes |
||
1.0-rc1 or later |
Yes |
Yes |
||
1.0 (not 1.1) |
Yes |
Yes |
||
Eclipse IDE with MyEclipse plugin |
3.0 |
No |
No |
|
7.0.1 |
No |
No |
XDoclet
XDoclet is used to maintain the many configuration files required by the tools used by GRITS (for example, Hibernate). The use of XDoclet is importnat because it keeps all of the information abount an object (for example, it's database mapping information) in one place where it belongs, namely the Java source file itself.
The XDoclet distribution is very modular and has its functionality distributed across several jar files, which allows a project to use only the subset of functionality it needs. GRITS currently uses the following parts of XDoclet 1.2.1:
lib/build/xdoclet-1.2.1.jar lib/build/xdoclet-hibernate-module-1.2.1.jar lib/build/xdoclet-web-module-1.2.1.jar lib/build/xdoclet-webwork-module-1.2.1.jar lib/build/xdoclet-xdoclet-module-1.2.1.jar lib/build/xjavadoc-1.0.3.jar
Hibernate
GRITS uses Hibernate 2, an Object-Relational Mapping (ORM) framework, for all of its database persistence requirements. Hibernate requires several third party libraries, all of which are included in the GRITS CVS module.
lib/runtime/hibernate/cglib-full-2.0.1.jar lib/runtime/hibernate/dom4j-1.4.jar lib/runtime/hibernate/ehcache-0.7.jar lib/runtime/hibernate/hibernate2.jar lib/runtime/hibernate/odmg-3.0.jar lib/runtime/commons-collections-2.1.jar lib/runtime/commons-logging-1.0.3.jar lib/runtime/log4j-1.2.8.jar
Front End Libraries
GRITS uses several third-party libraries to generate the web pages of the application. All of these are built upon the JSP 1.2 (not JSP 1.3) specification.
JSP stands for Java Server Pages, and refers to the fact that a .jsp page is compiled into a Java Servlet by the JSP container. The Java in JSP does not mean that Java code should be embedded in JSP pages. The fact that Java can be embedded in a JSP page according to older specifications of the JSP standard does not mean that you should, and as a matter of fact the ability to embed Java in JSP pages has been turned off by default in later specifications of the JSP standard.
There are much better ways to provide programability and scriptability to the front end. The following table lists the tools that provide this functionality.
Third Party Tool |
Version |
Home Page |
Required |
Included in CVS |
|---|---|---|---|---|
WebWork2 |
2.1 or later |
Yes |
Yes |
|
SiteMesh |
2.0.1 or later |
Yes |
Yes |
|
displaytag |
1.0-rc1 or later |
Yes |
Yes |
|
JSP Standard Tag Library |
1.0 (not 1.1) |
Yes |
Yes |
WebWork 2 is the workhorse of the GRITS front end. It is composed of the following jar files:
lib/runtime/webwork/cos-multipart.jar lib/runtime/webwork/mail.jar lib/runtime/webwork/ognl-2.6.5.jar lib/runtime/webwork/oscore-2.2.4.jar lib/runtime/webwork/pell-multipart.jar lib/runtime/webwork/velocity-dep-1.3.1.jar lib/runtime/webwork/webwork-2.1.jar lib/runtime/webwork/xwork-1.0.1.jar
SiteMesh is the layout engine of the entire GRITS application, and allows for all of the web pages to be loosely coupled and created independently of other web pages. All of the SiteMesh functionality is contained in one jar:
lib/runtime/webwork/sitemesh-2.0.1.jar
The displaytag library is a JSP tag library whose only purpose it to ease the display of tables in JSP.
Directory Structure
Upon initial checkout, the GRITS project has the following directory layout. A few hidden files related to the Eclipse IDE have been omitted, as they are irrelevent to the current discussion.
build.properties build.xml resin.xml lib/ src/
The lib/ directory contains jar files needed for building and running grits. The lib/build/ directory contains all of the jar files required to compile the grits Java source code. It is this colleciton of jars you'll want to put on the CLASSPATH for whatever IDE you are using.
lib/build/*.jar lib/runtime/hibernate/*.jar lib/runtime/webwork/*.jar
The src/ directory contains all of the source code, including the Java source code, the JSP files, configuration files and deployment descriptors.
src/config/db/ src/config/middlegen/ src/java/ src/test/ src/webapp/
The Java source code lives in src/java/, while the JUnit tests for this source code lives in src/test/. The web application itseld lives in src/webapp and has the standard directory structure for a J2EE container.