How To Build POI
Installing Ant

The POI build system requires two components to perform a build. Ant and forrest.

Specifically the build has been tested to work with Ant version 1.5.3 and Forrest 0.4. To install these products download the distributions and follow the instructions in their documentation. Make sure you don't forget to set the environment variables FORREST_HOME and ANT_HOME. The ANT_HOME/bin directory should be in the path.

One these products are installed you will also need to download some extra jar files required by the build.

Library Location
junit http://www.ibiblio.org/maven/junit/jars/
xerces http://www.ibiblio.org/maven/xerces/jars/
jdepend http://www.ibiblio.org/maven/jdepend/jars/
xalan http://www.ibiblio.org/maven/xalan/jars/

Just pick the latest versions of these jars and place them in ANT_HOME/lib and make sure that optional.jar is in ANT_HOME/lib .

Running the Build

On the first run the ant build system will download all the jars required by the project to build ant. If you're behind a firewall this may cause some problems. Should you need to it's possible to manually put the jars in the correct directories. These can be obtained from here:

JAR Location
/commons-logging/jars/commons-logging-1.0.1.jar lib
/log4j/jars/log4j-1.2.8.jar lib
/commons-beanutils/jars/commons-beanutils-1.6.jar src/contrib/lib
/commons-collections/jars/commons-collections-2.1.jar src/contrib/lib
/commons-lang/jars/commons-lang-1.0-b1.jar src/contrib/lib
/junit/jars/junit-3.8.1.jar lib

The main targets of interest to our users are:

Target Description
clean Erase all build work products (ie, everything in the build directory
compile Compiles all files from main, contrib and scratchpad
test Run all unit tests from main, contrib and scratchpad
docs Generate all documentation for the system
generate-records Generate records from the XML record defintitions
generate-types Generate types from the XML type definitions (this is for HWPF).
jar Produce jar files
dist Create a distribution.
clean-dist Runs clean before creating the distribution.