Installing Abra

Getting Abra

Source Code

You can download the source for the latest Abra release from SourceForge http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=34165 .

If you prefer the edge, you can access the code as it is being developed via CVS (also SourceForge). accessing CVS. Module is currently Abra-0.8 See the section Building Abra on how to build Abra from the source code. You can also access the Abra CVS repository on-line.

System Requirements

To build and use Abra, you must have a JAXP-compliant XML parser installed and available on your classpath.

You can build a library with Oracle, PostgreSQL (or sybase, mysql, db2-UDB).

You also have to install the Apache "ant" tool (http://jakarta.apache.org/ant). you also have to download the Apache "regexp" libraries (http://jakarta.apache.org/regexp).

Before building you will have to assign the following environment variables:

ABRA_HOME - this is the directory that contains the Abra distribution
JDBC_JAR - the path to the Jar file containing the appropriate JDBC library
XML_JAR - the path to the Jar file containing the XML parser
REGEXP_JAR - the path containing the regexp 'jar' file.
JUNIT_JAR - the path containing the junit 'jar' file for testing.
optional:

JCUP_JAR - the path containing the java_cup libraries for xml parser and dtd converter

For the current version of Abra (0.9.6), you will also need a JDK installed on your system, version 1.2 or later. A future version of Abra may require JDK 1.3 or later.

Building Abra

Once you have installed the source, change into the installation directory.

Set the JAVA_HOME environment variable to the directory where the JDK is installed.

Make sure you have downloaded all required jars and set all required environment variables.

Your are now ready to build Abra:

To build with Postgres do:

cd 'wherever the top directory for Abra is' ant postgresql

The jar files will be in $ABRA_HOME/lib. To build Oracle version just type 'ant oracle' (making sure JDBC_JAR points to the correct oracle JDBC classes) To run you can either use AbraTask

Testing Abra

To make sure abra is working ok try running the Junit test suite

make sure that your database is up and running

cp the file $ABRA_HOME/conf/db.props and replace giving your connection parameters (ie to $ABRA_HOME/db.props.psql, and replace)

'ant junit-generate'

'ant junit-run -Ddb.props=<absolute-path of your file>'

hopefully all tests should run - if stored procedures aren't implemented in your database; then part of TestTiming will fail