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Glow - Project Tools

This page describes the tools you need to run Glow (just Java), or to build Glow (Java 2 Standard Edition and Ant); with these tools installed, just use a single command 'ant run' in the glow directory to build and run Glow.

Get Glow!

The current binary distribution is available on the project downloads page. The source
is available from CVS as described on the project source page. The source page also has links to the CVS executable and an introduction to using CVS with OpenOffice.org. You might find this CVS tutorial useful.

Running Glow

Glow is a Java project, so the most essential tool is Java itself. If you don't already have Java installed, you just need a Java Runtime Environment (or JRE) to run Glow; there is a nice site to get you started.

Building Glow

To build Glow or to work on source code, you need the Java 2 Standard Edition developer kit, you can download that here. You don't need the version that includes NetBeans IDE, but if you don't already have an Integrated Development Environment, it's got a lot of features. If you don't like NetBeans, there are a lot of free Java IDE's; please see below and mail your suggestions to dev@groupware.openoffice.org (a subject line beginning with "IDE suggestion:" will be sure to get attention) if we don't mention your favourite IDE.

Glow has a very straightforward build structure, just two directory hierachies (one for product code and one for test code), so you can define a project to build Glow in most IDE's in about 5 minutes (or about 15 seconds if you have  worked on a few Java projects!). However, the standard way to build Glow is to use the Ant build.xml script. You can get version of Ant to run from the Apache Ant downloads page. The build.xml supports other commands, just type 'ant' in the glow directory to see the list of commands.

Contributing to Glow

You don't need any other tools to contribute to Glow! If you want to contribute a requirements or specification document, we prefer plain text, HTML or an OpenOffice.org format because that allows almost everyone to read your contribution, but you can also use some other formats

Free Java IDE's

Eclipse is another free IDE. If you are a private developer or a student, you may qualify to use the JBuilder Personal edition. There are a lot of other IDEs at this links site, or type "free java ide" in Google! Please mail your suggestions to dev@groupware.openoffice.org if we don't mention your favourite IDE.