As of version 2.0 FreeHEP uses Maven 2 to handle compilation, packaging, releasing and building of the websites. In future it will also build the native parts of FreeHEP using maven. FreeHEP also uses the binary (jar) dependency mechanism of maven to be able to do a partial build of the library without downloading all the code, but just referring to downloaded jar files.
If you checked out (part of) the source of FreeHEP you will need a copy of Maven 2 to be able to compile it.
For instructions to install maven 2 refer to http://maven.apache.org.
Maven 2 keeps all its meta-information in a Project Object Model file called pom.xml. This file lists among others, the name, group and version of the artifact that will be produced, the dependencies on other modules and general settings. Pom files can inherit from eachother and FreeHEP uses this feature. The individual libraries define specific information in their pom file, and inherit more general information from the pom file of the global lib they are part of. This pom file in turn inherits FreeHEP wide settings from the general pom.
Pom files are published in the maven repository and can thus be found even if you only check out a small submodule.
The default target FreeHEP specifies is "install" which will compile, package and copy the artifacts into your local maven repository (on your machine) by executing on of the following commands:
mvn mvn install
Most modules will have unit and or integration tests, which run atomatically before install. The tests may be skipped using the command
mvn -Dmaven.test.skip=true
The result of the tests is normally written into some xml files for processing into the website for publication. However if you want to see why a test fails and see the output on the screen you should use
mvn -Dsurefire.useFile=false
Maven takes care of downloading all the necessary dependencies automatically from our maven repository http://java.freehep.org/maven2 or from the default ibiblio maven repository http://www.ibiblio.org/maven2. We do use some proprietary Sun jar files which we can only publish for SLAC users. You can download these jars from Sun yourself and install them in your local repository, or if you are connected inside SLAC you can use:
mvn -Dproprietary
Our jars are meant for usage with maven 2 (mvn). Some of our jars are available in our maven 1 repository for backward compatibility http://java.freehep.org/maven. Maven 1 does NOT handle transitive dependencies, so you need to flatten out all the dependencies needed for a particular jar. We generate a project.xml file in the target directory with all needed jar files (FIXME: maybe we should just publish this on the web and on the maven 1 repository).
FreeHEP also makes use of the maven 2 multi-module feature. If you execute the maven command in a global library module (base for instance), it will compile and install all the submodules (freehep-util, freehep-io, ...) in order of dependency. Running the maven command from the top-level will compile and install all submodules.