Deliverable 1

Chapter One

Cloning, Building, and Compiling H/FOSS Project: Open Trip Planner

Cloning and Building

We were able to clone the project, Open Trip Planner, from Github. Working from OTP’s “Getting OTP” documentation, we went through the steps, which were all seemingly simple enough. We downloaded openJDK 8, maven, and git. Then, we cloned the project and ran a build and clean through Maven command. Initially, we received a “build failure” result with the error message outputted to the screen that we needed a higher version of Maven. On further inspection, we discovered that the version of Maven that we downloaded, which was the default that OTP told us to use in the command line, was an older version of Maven. Updating Maven proved more difficult than we thought. After searching for a solution through trial and error, we finally found a very recent tutorial that was extremely helpful. We downloaded the newer Maven and made sure it had downloaded correctly. Therefore, we ran the command to build OTP and “clean package” once again. After a few minutes, once we all got the message “build success”, we tried to compile it. This proved troublesome because we had to decide whether to compile it on the command line, Eclipse, NetBeans, or some other compiler. After some research, it seemed as if Eclipse would be too complicated for this complex project; therefore, one group member tried to compile it on NetBeans and another on the command line from the terminal. This was easier said than done. We debated on if we should abandon OTP and start another; however, we decided to continue with OTP.

Compiling and Tests

Downloading NetBeans on Ubuntu was tricky as first because the NetBeans Linux installation instructions produced errors on Ubuntu. Once again, a team member searched for a NetBeans tutorial for installation on Ubuntu and followed instruction from ubuntuhandbook.org. Their steps were very straightforward and there were no problems downloading NetBeans. Once the project was opened in NetBeans, everything seemed to be running great since there was no code underlined in red. A few tests ran with success; however, NetBeans decided to download a bunch of plugins randomly and after that, the tests would no longer run with failed exception messages in the output that it needed a different Maven plugin, which was not found. It also seems that NetBeans has duplicated the dependencies in that it downloaded them twice and that is the reason for the fail.

Experience

Overall, the trial and error process taught a lot in how to figure out other ways to do a task when one way would not work. Although frustrating at times because OTP was more complex than realized (code seemed very organized), the “build success” we received boosted our confidence. The plugins for Maven and running the tests gave us difficulty. However, our greatest problem was scheduling meeting times to work on the project because we all have very different schedules. However, once we found a time, we successfully built OTP on Ubuntu. The tests seemed to have failed because of the other dependencies such as getting data for different cities to use and various other files that OTP requires.