HOWTO build Rave with Visual Studio

This HOWTO desribes the minimum-effort approach for building Rave using Visual Studio 2005 Professional. Later this will be tested and if necessary adapted for use with the free Express version of Visual Studio also.

Prerequisites

• A working installation of Visual Studio 2005 with C++ support
• (optional) For the Java bindings you will need a working installation of a JDK

Preparation

Rave has two principal dependencies: Boost and CLHEP.

Boost can be obtained in various ways. For Windows users the most convenient way is perhaps to use a setup program.

• Download and install the boost setup package from ​http://www.boost-consulting.com/products/free
• Set the BOOST_PATH environment variable to the chosen installation directory. (There has to be a boost/math subdirectory at the location given by BOOST_PATH.)

The same counts for CLHEP as well. It is released as source package as well es precompiled binaries. At the moment however there are no appropriate binaries for use with the latest generation of Microsoft compilers. Therefore users must compile the libraries on their own, which is straightforward, but involves the use of Cygwin. To circumvent the necessity of installing the otherwise unnecessary Cygwin environment, we will provide a precompiled package of the current version of CLHEP.

• Download and unpack the CLHEP binary package from NotYetUploaded?
• Set the CLHEP_PATH environment variable to the destination chosen during unpacking. (There has to be an include/CLHEP/Vector subdirectory at the given location.)

For the Java bindings to compile, the JDK installation path has to be published by an environment veriable as well. Recent JDK packages don't do this automatically.

• Set the JAVA_HOME environment veriable to the base directory of a JDK. (There has to be an include and an include/win32 subdirectory at that location)

If you face problems during later stages please make sure, that those three environment veriables (BOOST_PATH, CLHEP_PATH, JAVA_HOME) are set and accessible to the Visual Studio instance.

Download Rave

The easiest way to get the Rave sources is certainly to download a packaged source archive.