Introduction for Developers

To do development work on WordHoard, you need a Java development environment. We require Java 1.4 or later. You also need MySQL 5.0 or later and Ant installed on your development machine. You also need a reasonably fast development host with plenty of memory and plenty of free disk space. We recommend a gigagbyte of memory or more and two gigabytes of free disk space or more.

In this "Developer Notes" section of the manual, we give examples that work on the Mac OS X development environment of one of the developers at Northwestern University, using the UNIX C shell. The files you will download in the next chapter are also from this system. The details will most likely vary in your own environment. If you use the C shell on a Mac OS X system, most of the commands will probably work just fine as is, with perhaps a few exceptions.

In all of the examples, we assume that the current working directory is your WordHoard development directory, unless we explicitly mention otherwise.

The following drawings give a broad overview of WordHoard's architecture and data flow: