03. Building

If you are using the bundled distribution and planned to only use the compiled libraries *.jar, you can skip this section. Otherwise you will learn how to compile JFreeReport into libraries, how to generate documentations, ... using Ant, the building system we are using.
To know if Ant is already installed on your system just type ant in your system command line:

$> ant \-version
Apache Ant version 1.6.5 compiled on June 2 2005

If it is not working try to get the procedure how to install Ant to your system or do a manual install as describe on Ant installation page.

Here is a reminder if you don't want or need to read the full installation documentation. First get the lastest Ant binary version on the download page. Once extracted you will get the following layout:

• a directory containing launcher scripts, bin/.
• a directory containing Ant jars plus necessary dependencies, lib/.
• a directory containing documentations, docs/.
• a directory containing goodies, etc/.

Then define a variable called ANT_HOME that points to the root directory of the Ant distribution you just extract:

# On Windows environments
$> set ANT_HOME=drive:\path\to\ant
# On Unix environments
$> export ANT_HOME=/path/to/ant

And to finish append the luncher scripts directory to your executable path:

# On Windows environments
$> set PATH=%PATH%;%ANT_HOME%\bin
# On Unix environments
$> export PATH=$ {PATH}:${ANT_HOME}/bin

Now Ant is working just go to the ant/ directory of JFreeReport distribution and type the command ant. This command will automaticaly load the configuration file named build.xml and will process the whole compilation of the project. The result will be exactly the same as JFreeReport bundled distribution we saw in a previous section.

ant targets description