Welcome to the 1.0.2-incubating release of Apache Etch. The jumping off point for Etch information and help is here: http://cwiki.apache.org/ETCH The top-level structure of the install image is: ChangeLog.txt LICENSE.txt README.txt NOTICE.txt RELEASE_NOTES.txt bin/ lib/ examples/ maven/ uninst.exe (windows only) Please take a moment to review the RELEASE_NOTES.txt, ChangeLog.txt and LICENSE.txt files. The Windows installer (apache-etch-1.0.2-incubating-setup.exe) has created a user environment variable (ETCH_HOME) which points to the Etch installation directory. If you installed Etch using either apache-etch-1.0.2-incubating-bin.tar.gz or apache-etch-1.0.2-incubating-bin.zip, you will want to create this environment variable yourself: windows: set ETCH_HOME=C:\Program Files\Apache Software Foundation\apache-etch-1.0.2-incubating *nix: export ETCH_HOME=/path/to/apache-etch-1.0.2-incubating The bin directory has also been put on your path by the Windows installer. If you are using the archives, you will need to do this yourself: windows: PATH %PATH%;%ETCH_HOME%\bin *nix: export PATH="$PATH:$ETCH_HOME/bin" The bin/ directory contains a Windows bat script and a unix shell script. You will also need to have a java sdk installed (later versions of 1.5 or any version of 1.6). A JAVA_HOME environment variable should point to the installation directory of the java sdk. In the end, at a command line or shell, you should be able to run the etch compiler and see some basic output: windows: C:\>etch etch: option '-b binding' must be specified on the command line unix: bash-3.2$ etch etch: option '-b binding' must be specified on the command line The lib directory contains the various jar files, zipped sources, and a C# dll: Etch.dll etch-ant-plugin-1.0.2-src.zip etch-ant-plugin-1.0.2.jar etch-java-runtime-1.0.2-src.zip etch-java-runtime-1.0.2.jar ... The main items of interest are the language binding runtimes, which you need to link with your projects. For java you need to put on the classpath of your projects: etch-java-runtime-1.0.2.jar. There is source code to go with it in etch-java-runtime-1.0.2-src.zip. The C# (.NET 2.0) Etch.dll should be added to any C# projects. There is an ant plugin which you can use with ant 1.7.0 or later to invoke the compiler as a task. It is documented on the wiki referenced above. If you are using maven, then you might want to install the Etch artifacts into your local maven repository. There is a Windows bat script to do this in the maven directory: etch-maven-install.bat You need to have maven on your path when you run this script. The file etch-java-runtime-1.0.2.jar will be installed into your local repository with group "etch.etch", artifact id "etch-java-runtime", and version "1.0.2". You may then reference Etch from your maven projects. Examples have been provided in the examples/ subdirectory. Unit tests can be had by checking out the source code from the subversion repository and performing a complete build: https://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/incubator/etch/releases/release-1.0.2