Today is a big day for Olap4j. =)<br><br>I just committed into the repository all the stuff needed to build Olap4j via Ant+Ivy. There are a few things to know about this change, so here they are.<br><br><b>Usage of Mondrian SNAPSHOT builds</b><br>
<br>Olap4j is now built against Mondrian's bleeding edge builds. Since continuous integrations seems the way to go these days, there is no point not taking advantage of such a wonderful feature. For now it's using the mondrian-3.1-SNAPSHOT jar located in Pentaho's repo. If this artifact is not the one that gets updated by the Hudson build system, please advise me immediately and I'll fix it up.<br>
<br>This means that we should be able to detect any disrupting changes in the Mondrian source tree and how exactly it affects the Olap4j's behaviour. As some people will notice, the tests currently fail due to a serialization issue, but as soon as Mondrian in turn gets built against Olap4j's SNAPSHOT release, everything should fall back to normal.<br>
<br><b>How to build Olap4j</b><br><br>Building Olap4j is now a trivial matter. It used to be painful and complicated; fear not. That's a thing of the past. The only operations required to build Olap4j are now a SVN checkout and running the "dist" goal in Ant. Everything else is done and resolved for you.<br>
<br><b>How to test Olap4j</b><br><br>I took the liberty of simplifying the testing kit since I was doing some major refactoring anyways. The tests now run on a automatically supplied HSQL database. It gets configured thanks to SimpleJNDI. If you want to run the tests against your own database, simply modify the simple-jndi/jdbc.properties file. <br>
<br>By default, the test suite uses the Mondrian tester. In order to test the XMLA driver, one needs to change the org.olap4j.test.helperClassName property in test.properties.<br><br>Launching the tests can be done with the "test" goal in Ant.<br>
<br><b>Points of interest</b><br><br>Olap4j now requires Ant 1.7 or newer. The TCK also requires Ant to be allowed at least 1024 mb of memory. This is easily achieved by either launching Ant with the proper parameters or by setting the ANT_OPTS environment variable accordingly.<br>
<br>All the dependencies are defined in ivy.xml. If you want to build Olap4j against a different Mondrian version, this is where you tell which one to fetch. There is also a very nifty feature that allows you to test Olap4j against developer specific libraries. You can place any special JAR file in the [root]/dev-libs folder and it will get picked up at compilation. This allows developers to test Olap4j with whatever libraries without actually having to deploy them in a Maven repository first. Kewl heh?<br>
<br><b>Special thanks</b><br><br>I'd like to thank Aaron Phillips from Pentaho (he's the build guy there...) for his very precious help. Also thanks to Julian for validation and critics. Always appreciated.<br><br clear="all">
_____________________________<br>Luc Boudreau<br>