Kuali Rice: Build from source (cont)
25 August 2008Although it’s technically true that I did successfully build Kuali Rice from source, upon further review it appears that there are still a few hanging compile errors that, for whatever reason, did not trigger a failure of the build. From a real quick look, it appears to be just a few more missing dependencies, but I haven’t really gotten that deeply into it just yet. For now, I thought I had better write up what I have done so far to get to this point before I forget it entirely! Most of the information needed to build Rice from source can be found here:
https://test.kuali.org/confluence/display/KULRICE/Setting+up+Eclipse+for+a+Rice+Project
Of course, right off the bat I deviated from the clearly written instructions, but that’s just one of those bad habits that I can’t seem to break. Step 1 in the Download the Tools section tells you to download and install the Java 5 SDK, so I went out to Sun’s web site and downloaded the Java 6 SDK (Hey, it’s newer, so it’s got to be better, right?!). Then in Step 2, it says to go out to Eclipse and download Europa, so I go out to the Eclipse site and find Ganymede, and of course, I download that instead (Hey, newer — better!). And last, but not least, instead of following the directions in Step 3 to download the Maven command line tools, I pull in the latest Maven Integration for Eclipse plugin via the Eclipse update process.
At this point, I have my development environment ready to go, so I go out and download the source code and import it into a clean workspace. That goes remarkably well, all things considered, and now I have a single Maven project called rice in my workspace. So far, so good.
Of course, the first thing that Maven wants to do is to resolve all of the dependencies, so there goes a few hours while it goes out to the ‘net and brings down presumably all that it needs to build the project. When it gets all through with that, I see that it has brought in all of the SVN connections as well, which is OK, but since I’m not a developer on the project and will never commit anything to the repository, I decided to cut that cord. I right-clicked on the project and selected Team -> Disconnect to remove the linkage to the Kuali Subversion repository.
The next section of the instructions is the Set up database drivers section. Out of the box, Kuali Rice is set to use Oracle for its database. Nothing against Larry, but if I had 10 choices for a database, I would put Oracle as #11 on my list of preferences. I don’t know why that is, and I can’t really give it any kind of rational justification, but that’s just the way I feel. I’ve worked with many Oracle databases over the years at various establishments, but for some reason, I just don’t like Oracle.
So I set up my version of Rice to use MySQL. It took me a while, but I finally found the MySQL script to set up all of the tables in the database here:
https://test.kuali.org/svn/rice/branches/rice-release-0-9-3-br/scripts/ddl/mysql.ddl
That ran like a charm the first time out, and then I did it again for the test database as well. I went into the Maven pom.xml file for the project and deleted the dependency on Oracle’s JDBC driver, and then added one for MySQL’s. If you skip down in the instructions you will see that setting up the database actually comes way later in the directions, but hey — instructions are just suggestions, anyway!
Which, by the way, brings us to the current state, because rather than follow the instructions and run the Ant build.xml file (which wasn’t downloaded with my project, by the way, but there’s probably instructions for that somewhere, too!), I just right-clicked on the project and selected Run As … -> Maven Install. Which I actually did a couple of times until I thought I had brought in all of the missing dependencies, but I see now that there are still a few more.
Anyway, that’s how things got to where they are today. Obviously, there is still much to be done, and as is usually the case when I deviate from the trail clearly marked by others, there is probably much to be redone as well.
But, that will be another story …
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