Introduction
============

See the web site http://maxent.sf.net

The maxent package can be build with ant and maven. 

Building with maven
==========================
To build the package make sure maven is installed
on your system.
The current version and installation instructions
can be found here:
http://maven.apache.org/download.html

Go into the maxent source directory
and type:
mvn install

The maxent jar file will then be installed into your
local maven repository.

To build the source distribution from the source
type:
mvn assembly:assembly


Building with ant
==========================

The Maxent build system is based on Jakarta Ant, which is a Java
building tool originally developed for the Jakarta Tomcat project but
now used in many other Apache projects and extended by many
developers.

Ant is a little but very handy tool that uses a build file written in
XML (build.xml) as building instructions. For more information refer
to "http://jakarta.apache.org/ant/".

The only thing that you have to make sure of is that the "JAVA_HOME"
environment property is set to match the top level directory
containing the JVM you want to use. For example:

C:\> set JAVA_HOME=C:\jdk1.2.2

or on Unix:

% setenv JAVA_HOME /usr/local/java
  (csh)
> JAVA_HOME=/usr/java; export JAVA_HOME
  (ksh, bash)

Ok, let's build the code. First, make sure your current working
directory is where the build.xml file is located. Then type

  ./build.sh (unix)

if everything is right and all the required packages are visible, this
action will generate a file called "maxent-${version}.jar" in the
"./build" directory. Note, that if you do further development,
compilation time is reduced since Ant is able to detect which files
have changed an to recompile them at need.

If something went wrong, go to the FAQ section below.

Also, you'll note that reusing a single JVM instance for each task, increases
tremendously the performance of the whole build system, compared to other
tools (i.e. make or shell scripts) where a new JVM is started for each task.


Build targets
=============

The build system is not only responsible for compiling Maxent into a jar
file, but is also responsible for creating the HTML documentation in
the form of javadocs.

These are the meaningful targets for this build file:

 - package [default] -> creates ./build/maxent.jar
 - compile -> compiles the source code
 - javadoc -> generates the API documentation in ./build/javadocs
 - clean -> restores the distribution to its original and clean state

For example, to build the Java API documentation, type

build.sh javadoc
(Unix)

To learn the details of what each target does, read the build.xml file.  It is
quite understandable.


Bug Reports
===========

Please report bugs at the bug section of the Maxent sourceforge site:

http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?atid=105961&group_id=5961&func=browse

Also, you can report bugs by sending mail to Jason Baldridge at
jmb@cogsci.ed.ac.uk.


Special Note
============

This README and the directory structure and the build system for this
project were taken directly from the JDOM project. Many thanks to
Jason Hunter and Brett McLaughlin for creating a very elegant way of
working with XML in Java.  See www.jdom.org for more details.