Building the Server from Source Code

Source code is available for every JBoss module, and you can build any version of JBoss from source by downloading the appropriate version of the code from SourceForge.

Accessing the JBoss CVS Repositories at SourceForge

The JBoss source is hosted at SourceForge, a great open-source community service provided by VA Linux Systems. With more than 88,000 open-source projects and nearly 950,000 registered users, SourceForge is the largest open-source hosting service available. Many of the top open-source projects have moved their development to the SourceForge.net site. The services offered by SourceForge include hosting of project CVS repositories and a web interface for project management that includes bug tracking, release management, mailing lists, and more. Best of all, these services are free to all open-source developers. For additional details and to browse the plethora of projects, see the SourceForge home page (http://sourceforge.net).

Understanding CVS

CVS is an open-source version control system that is used pervasively throughout the open-source community. CVS is a source-control or revision-control tool that is designed to keep track of source changes made by groups of developers who are working on the same files. CVS enables developers to stay in sync with each other as each individual chooses.

Anonymous CVS Access

The JBoss project's SourceForge CVS repository can be accessed through anonymous (pserver) CVS. The module you want to check out must be specified as modulename. When prompted for a password for anonymous, you simply press the Enter key. The following is the general syntax of the command-line version of CVS for anonymous access to the JBoss repositories:

 cvs -d:pserver:[e-mail]:/cvsroot/jboss login cvs -z3 -d:pserver:[e-mail]:/cvsroot/jboss co modulename 

The first command logs you in to the JBoss CVS repository as an anonymous user. This command needs to be performed only once for each machine on which you use CVS because the login information will be saved in your HOME/.cvspass file or the equivalent for your system. The second command checks out a copy of the modulename source code into the directory from which you run the cvs command. To avoid having to type the long cvs command line each time, you can set up a CVSROOT environment variable with the value :pserver:[e-mail]:/cvsroot/jboss and then use the following abbreviated versions of the previous commands:

 cvs login 

The name of the JBoss module alias you use depends on the version of JBoss you want. For the 4.0 branch, the module name is jboss-4.0, for the 3.2 branch it is jboss-3.2, and in general, for branch x.y the module name is jboss-x.y. To check out the HEAD revision of JBoss to obtain the latest code on the main branch, you would use jboss-head as the module name. Releases of JBoss are tagged with the pattern JBoss_X_Y_Z, where X is the major version, Y is the minor version, and Z is the patch version. Release branches of JBoss are tagged with the pattern Branch_X_Y. The following are some checkout examples:

 cvs co -r Branch_4_0 jboss-4.0 # Checkout the current 3.0 branch code cvs co -r JBoss_4_0_1 jboss-4.0 # Checkout the 4.0.1 release version code cvs co -r JBoss_3_2_6 jboss-3.2 # Checkout the 3.2.6 release version code cvs co jboss-head # Checkout the current HEAD branch code 

Obtaining a CVS Client

The command-line version of the CVS program is freely available for nearly every platform, and it is included by default on most Linux and Unix distributions. A good port for CVS as well as numerous other Unix programs for Windows 32-bit platforms is Cygwin, at http://sources.redhat.com/cygwin/. In the next few sections, let's examine the syntax of the command-line version of CVS, which is common across all platforms.

Note

For complete documentation on CVS, check out the CVS home page, at www.cvshome.org.

Building the JBoss Distribution Using the Source Code

Every JBoss release includes a source archive that contains everything needed to build the release and is available from the files section of the JBoss project site, at http://sourceforge.net/projects/jboss/. The source directory structure matches that of the CVS source tree described in the following section, so once you have the source distribution, you can build the release by following the instructions given in the next section, beginning with the instructions after the step to obtain the jboss-4.0 source tree.

Building the JBoss Distribution Using the CVS Source Code

This section guides you through the task of building a JBoss distribution from the CVS source code. To start, you create a directory into which you want to download the CVS source tree, and then you move into the newly created directory. This directory is referred to as the CVS_WD directory, for CVS working directory. The example build in this book checks out code into a /tmp/jboss directory on a Linux system. Next, you obtain the 4.0.1 version of the source code, as shown here:

  [ tmp] $ mkdir jboss [ tmp] $ cd jboss [jboss]$ export CVSROOT=:pserver:[e-mail]:/cvsroot/jboss [jboss]$ cvs co -r JBoss_4_0_1 jboss-4.0 cvs checkout: Updating aop U aop/.classpath U aop/.cvsignore U aop/.project U aop/RELEASE_NOTES.txt ... 

The resulting jboss-4.0 directory structure contains all the CVS modules required to build the server. To perform the build, you cd to the jboss-all/build directory and execute the build.sh or build.bat file, as appropriate for your OS. You need to set the JAVA_HOME environment variable to the location of the JDK you wish to use for compilation, and the JDK bin directory should be on your path:

  [jboss]$ cd jboss-4.0/build/ [ build] $ . /build. sh Searching for build.xml ... Buildfile: /tmp/jboss/jboss-4.0/build/build.xml ... BUILD SUCCESSFUL Total time: 2 minutes 41 seconds 

Note that if you see a "Failed to launch JJTree" error, you do not have in your PATH variable the JAVA_HOME/bin directory that is required for the JavaCC JJTree Ant task.

The build process is driven by an Ant-based configuration. The main Ant build script is the build. xml file located in the jboss-4.0/build directory. This script uses a number of custom Ant tasks masked as buildmagic constructs. The purpose of the main build.xml file is to compile the various module directories under jboss-4.0 and then to integrate their output to produce the binary release. The binary release structure is found under the jboss-4.0/build/output directory. The preceding example uses the build.sh script to kick off the build process. This is just a wrapper that launches the ant binary included in the distribution. You can use Ant directly to build if your environment is configured to run it from the command line.

An Overview of the JBoss CVS Source Tree

The top-level directory structure under the jboss-4.0 source tree is illustrated in Figure 1.3, which shows the CVS source tree top-level directories. Table 1.2 describes the primary purpose of each of the top-level directories.

Figure 1.3. The testsuite CVS module directory structure.

Table 1.2. The Top-Level Directories of the JBoss CVS Source Tree

Directory	Description
aop	The JBoss AOP module
aspects	The JBossAOP aspect library
build	The main build directory from which the release builds are initiated
cache	The JBoss TreeCache module
cluster	The clustering support services source module
common	A source module of common utility-type code used by many of the other source modules
connector	The JCA support and application server integration source module
console	Admin apps for viewing the JMX MBeans
deployment	The JSR 88 J2EE application deployment module
hibernate	The Hibernate deployer service
iiop	The RMI/IIOP transport service source module
j2ee	The core J2EE interfaces and classes
jaxrpc	The J2EE Web Services module
jboss.net	A Web Services support source module that provides support for using SOAP to invoke operations on EJBs and MBeans
jmx	The JBoss JMX implementation source module
jmx-remoting	The JMX remoting module
management	The JBoss JSR-77 source module
media	The enterprise media beans module
messaging	The JBoss JMS implementation source module
naming	The JBoss JNDI implementation source module
remoting	The JBoss remoting module
security	The JBoss standard J2EE declarative security implementation, which is based on JAAS
server	The EJB container
system	The JMX microkernel-based bootstrap services and standard deployment services source module
testsuite	The JUnit unit test source module
thirdparty	A module that contains the third-party binary JARs used by the JBoss modules
tomcat	The Tomcat-5.0.x embedded service source module
tools	The JARs used by the JBoss build process
TRansaction	The JTA transaction manager
varia	Various utility services that have not been or will not be integrated into one of the higher-level modules
webservice	The J2EE Web Service implementation in JBoss
xdoclet	A directory that builds the XDoclet support library

Using the JBossTest Unit Testsuite

You can do more advanced testing of the JBoss installation and builds by using the JBoss Testsuite. The JBoss Testsuite is a collection of client-oriented unit tests of the JBoss server application. It is an Ant-based package that uses the JUnit (www.junit.org) unit test framework. The JBoss Testsuite is used as a QA benchmark by the development team to help test new functionality and prevent introduction of bugs. It is run on a nightly basis, and the results are posted to the development mailing list for all to see.

The unit tests are run using Ant, and the source for the tests are contained in the jboss-4.0/testsuite directory of the source tree. The structure of the testsuite CVS module is illustrated in Figure 1.3.

The two main source branches of the testsuite CVS module are src/main and src/resources. The src/main tree contains the Java source code for the unit tests. The src/resources tree contains resource files such as deployment descriptors, JAR manifest, web content, and so on. The root package of every unit test is org.jboss.test. The typical structure below each specific unit test subpackage (for example, security) consists of a test package that contains the unit test classes. The test subpackage is a required naming convention because this is the only directory that is searched for unit tests by the Ant build scripts. If the tests involve EJBs, then the convention is to include interfaces and ejb subpackages for these components. The unit tests themselves need to follow a naming convention for the class file. The unit test class must be named XXXUnitTest.java, where XXX is either the class being tested or the name of the functionality being tested.

To run the unit tests, you use the build scripts located in the testsuite directory. The key targets in the build.xml file include the following:

• tests This target builds and runs all unit tests and generates HTML and text reports of the tests into the testsuite/output/reports/html and testsuite/output/reports/text directories, respectively.

• tests-standard-unit This target builds all unit tests and runs a subset of the key unit tests. This is useful for quickly checking the server to test for gross problems.

• test This target allows you to run all tests within a particular package. To run this target, you need to specify a test property and a package name, using the - Dtest=package command line. The package value is the name of the package below org. jboss.test that you want to run unit tests for. So, for example, to run all unit tests in the org.jboss.test.naming package, you would use build.sh-Dtest=naming test.

• one-test This target allows you to run a single unit test. To run this target, you need to specify a test property and the classname of the unit test by using - Dtest=classname on the command line. So, for example, to run org.jboss.test.naming.test.ENCUnitTestCase, you would use build.sh - Dtest=org.jboss.test.naming.test.ENCUnitTestCase one-test.

• tests-report This target generates HTML and text reports of the tests into the testsuite/output/reports/html and testsuite/output/reports/text directories, respectively, using the current JUnit XML results in the testsuite/output/reports directory. This is useful for generating nice HTML reports when you have run a subset of the tests by hand and want to generate a summary.

On completion of a test, the testsuite/output/reports directory will contain one or more XML files that represent the individual JUnit test runs. The tests-report target collates these into an HTML report located in the html subdirectory, along with a text report located in the text subdirectory. Figure 1.4 shows an example of the HTML report for a run of the testsuite against the JBoss 4.0.1 release.

Figure 1.4. An example of a testsuite-run report in status HTML view, as generated by the testsuite.

You can find the results of the testsuite in the JBoss distribution under the JBOSS_DIST/docs/tests directory.