Downloading and Installing as an ACUITy Developer (Extending ACUITy)

Required Software

Development Environment

The ACUITy team is developing using the Eclipse Java Development Environment (great environment!). The ACUITy Developer download (AcuitySource.zip) includes Ant build scripts for building the ACUITy environment and for creating, building and deploying ACUITy-powered applications. While use of Eclipse is not necessary, these instructions are specific to Eclipse. If you are using some other IDE, you’ll have to alter the process as appropriate. (And please share what you did.)

J2SE JDK

A Java environment is needed, at least version 5.0 for Tomcat 5.5 and at least SDK version 1.2 for Tomcat 4.1. For other application servers other requirements may apply.

To install a JDK, follow instructions at http://java.sun.com/javase/downloads/index.jsp.

Apache Tomcat

To-date, ACUITy has been tested on versions 5.5 and 4.1. We have not had success getting it to run with version 5.0. To install Tomcat, follow the instructions at http://tomcat.apache.org/.

ACUITy applications have also been deployed on various versions of JBoss.

Apache Ant

If you have Eclipse installed, you probably already have Ant. The path will point to a subdirectory of your eclipse plugins directory, e.g., .../eclipse/plugins/org.apache.ant_1.6.2. If the environment variable "ANT_HOME" is set to be the path to the Ant installation you will not need to edit the "createNewProject.bat" and "buildProjectWar.bat" during the installation of ACUITy and creation of a new application.

To install Ant, follow instructions at http://ant.apache.org/.

Note: When updating to a new version of ACUITy, applications will need to have the old ACUITy jar files removed manually from the "...lib/acuityLib" directory.

To set up the ACUITy Development Environment in Eclipse

There are two ways to obtain the ACUITy development environment from SourceForge.

Download AcuitySource.zip from the SourceForge download area and use to populate an Eclipse project.
Create an Eclipse project directly from the ACUITy project CVS repository.

By Using AcuitySource.zip

Create a new Java Project in Eclipse. This document assumes the project name is "ACUITy".
Unzip AcuitySource.zip into the new Eclipse workspace project directory, e.g., "...../workspace/ACUITy".

By Connecting Directly to the ACUITy CVS Repository

Open the CVS Repositories view in Eclipse and create a new repository connection by clicking on the "Add CVS Repository" icon.
Provide the connection properties:
- Check "Use the repository identification string as the label
- Connection type: this will depend on your network environment
- User: your SourceForge userid
- Password: your SourceForge password
- Host: acuity.cvs.sourceforge.net
- Repository path: /cvsroot/acuity
- Check "Use default port"
Once the connection to the repository is opened, expand by clicking on the "plus" icon: ...->HEAD->Acuity
Right-click on "Acuity" and select "Check Out". This will create your ACUITy project
Make the ACUITy project a Java-natured project. This can be done by adding the following within the projectDescription tag in the ".project" file in the ACUITy project root directory:

       <buildSpec>
              <buildCommand>
                     <name>org.eclipse.jdt.core.javabuilder</name>
                     <arguments>
                     </arguments>
              </buildCommand>
       </buildSpec>
       <natures>
              <nature>org.eclipse.jdt.core.javanature</nature>
       </natures>

Finishing Installation

Regardless of which of the above methods you use to obtain the project content (downloading AcuitySource.zip or checking out of CVS), continue with the steps below.

Refresh the ACUITy project resources. (In the Eclipse Package Explorer view, right-click on ACUITy and select Refresh.)
In the Eclipse Java view, right-click on the project name and select Properties->Java Build Path->Source. Add the folders ACUITy/AcuityCore/src, ACUITy/AcuityInterface/src, and ACUITy/ApplicationUtilities/src. Answer yes to any prompts. Then change the Default output folder to "ACUITy/classes".
In the Libraries tab (Properties->Java Build Path->Libraries), add the jar files in the ACUITy/SoftwareLibraries folder. The result should look something like this:
Run the Ant build file build.xml with target "buildTemplateZIP" to create the ApplicationUtilities jar, ACUITyCore jar, and the AcuityInterface jar files and create the template file (template.zip) required for creating ACUITy applications.

Congratulations! You now have an ACUITy developer’s environment and are ready to create an ACUITy-powered application.