Starting with release 617, the source code of the application is bundled with all the stuff required to build the final index.html, the same exact file loaded when using the Clipperz application. The build process is managed using an Apache Ant “script”: build.xml.

Required stuff

Apache Ant

Apache Ant is a quite common build tool used mainly for Java applications, but its features are quite flexible and it could be easily adapted to many other batch tasks. Instructions on how to install Ant are available from the online manual. The Clipperz project is regularly build using Ant version 1.6.5, running on MacOSX.

Additional Ant tasks

Beside the standard Ant tasks, our script also invokes two external tools:

• a customized version of Rhino realized by the Dojo project used to compress Javascript source files. This is a Java application and is included for convenience in our code package (jars/tool/custom_rhino.jar), so you should be able to use it out of the box.
• CSSTidy is an external compiled tool used to clean and compress CSS files. Being compiled, you need to install the right version for your platform. We are providing only the MacOSX version in the project package (tools/csstidy_osx_1.2). If you want to run the build script on another platform, you will need to download the right CSSTidy file, and fix the script reference into the build.xml file. It is probably possible to create a multiplatform build script, but at the moment we have no plan to implement it.

Package content

Once unpacked, the project folder contains the following items:

• build.xml: this is the main “script” to build the project;
• jar: a folder with all the required Java tools used by the script to build the project;
• properties: a folder containing property definitions used by the build scripts;
• src
  • css: folder containing all css definition files;
  • html: folder containing the template index.html file used by the script;
  • js: folder with all the JavaScript code used by the project, both original code and third-party library code;
• tools: folder with non Java-based external tools. At the moment containing only CSSTidy.

Running the script

To build the project, the Ant tool must be launched from the project folder containing the build.xml file. The default task is already setup, so it will just do the right thing. It is really this simple!

Expected output

The build script will put all the generated files into the _build folder, created beside the build.xml file. Inside the _build folder there should be two different folders:

• _scratch: a folder containing all the temporary files generated by the build script;
• context: a folder containing the final output of the build process: the index.html file.

The final index.html is the same exact file that is loaded into your browser when you access the Clipperz application; the checksums of this file should match the published checksum of the Clipperz application.