Building from Source

Table of Contents

• Build Dependencies
  • Optional Functionality
• Platform Notes
  • Mac OSX
    • Console / Make
    • Xcode
  • Linux
    • Preparing apt-get based distributions
    • Preparing yum based distributions
    • Console / Make
    • Eclipse CDT
  • Windows
    • Prepare compilation
  • Raspberry Pi
• Language Bindings
  • Java
  • CSharp
  • Important Note for Windows

This page describes how to build uSCXML from source, starting with either a git checkout or from a downloaded archive. The source code is built using CMake and the process of building uscxml is essentially the same on every platform.

1. Read the Platform Notes below to prepare your system.
2. Checkout uscxml into a convenient directory.
3. Create a new directory for an out-of-source build. I usually create sub-directories in <USCXML_SRC>/build/.
4. Run cmake (or ccmake / CMake-GUI) to create the files required by your actual build-system.
5. Use your actual build-system or development environment to build uscxml.
6. Optionally build the language bindings to embed the SCXML interpreter in another language.
7. Read the SCXML draft and have a look at the tests to get started.

For Makefiles on Unices, these steps essentially boil down to:

$ git clone git://github.com/tklab-tud/uscxml.git
$ mkdir uscxml/build && cd uscxml/build
$ cmake .. && make

For MSVC on Windows, run form a developer command-prompt and substitute the last line above by:

$ cmake -G "NMake Makefiles" .. && nmake

Note: If you want to build for another IDE or build-system, just create a new out-of-source build directory and start over with CMake. To get an idea of supported IDEs and build-environments on your platform, type cmake –help or run the CMake-GUI and look for the Generators section at the end of the output.

Note: If you plan to use the Eclipse CDT generator, you cannot have a build directory anywhere under the source directory - just create the build directory anywhere else. This only applies to the Eclipse CDT project generator.

Note: I could not build the language bindings with the Visual Studio generator as it croaks when calling SWIG, just have another build directory with the "NMake Makefiles" project generator.

Note: In order to compile with MinGW on windows you will have to adapt the build scripts in contrib/cmake/Build*. If you succeed, a pull request would be most appreciated.

Build Dependencies

Overview of the uSCXML dependencies. See the Platform Notes for details.

Note: We no longer maintain and download pre-compiled versions of the dependencies at configure-time. Instead, the build process is using external_project_add to download and compile the required dependencies on your machine.

Platform	Dependency	Version	Comment
Everyone	CMake required	>= 2.8.6	The build-system used for uSCXML.
	libevent required / auto-build	>= 2.0.22	Delayed event queues with timed callbacks and the HTTP server.
	curl required / auto-build	>= 7.48.0	URL downloads.
	Xerces-C++ required / auto-build	>= 3.1.3	XML Document Object Model
	uriparser required / auto-build	>= 0.8.4	URL resolving, referring and other operations
	SWIG optional	>= 2.0.6	Generates language bindings to embed uSCXML in other target languages.
	Doxygen optional	>= 1.8	Used by make docs to generate this documentation from source comments.
Mac OSX	XCode required	4.2 works	Apple's SDK with all the toolchains.
	MacPorts recommended	>= 2.0.3	Build system for a wide selection of open-source packages.
Linux	gcc / clang required	>= 4.8 / 3.3	C++ compiler with sufficient C++11 support.
Windows	Visual Studio / MSVC required	>= 2012	You need a C++ compiler that understands C++11.

Optional Functionality

At configure time, CMake will search for various libraries and conditionally compile only those components of uSCXML for which respective libraries have been found (e.g. the Lua or ECMAScript data-model implementations). On unices, it is straight forward to add libraries and CMake will usually pick them up.

On Windows, however, the process is more complicated. We primarily rely on the official CMake Modules to find the header files and libraries for various packages. This will, usually, take the file system destinations of popular installers into account. When you have trouble getting CMake to find some particular library, have a look at the Find* modules from the CMake distribution and the modules distributed with uSCXML in contrib/cmake/ to get an idea where the files are expected.

Platform Notes

The following sections will detail the preparation of the respective platforms to ultimately compile uscxml.

Mac OSX

You will have to install CMake via Macports:

# required dependencies
$ sudo port install cmake

# optional dependencies for language bindings
$ sudo port install apache-ant swig-java swig-php swig-csharp

# other optional dependencies
$ sudo port install lua v8

The rest is pre-installed or downloaded and built at configure-time. Just download the source and invoke CMake to create Makefiles or a Xcode project.

Console / Make

$ cd <USCXML_SRCDIR>
$ mkdir -p build/cli && cd build/cli
$ cmake ../..
[...]
-- Build files have been written to: .../build/cli
$ make

You can test whether everything works by starting the uscxml-browser with a test.scxml file:

$ ./bin/uscxml-browser ../../test/w3c/null/test436.scxml

Xcode

$ cd <USCXML_SRCDIR>
$ mkdir -p build/xcode && cd build/xcode
$ cmake -G Xcode ../..
[...]
-- Build files have been written to: .../build/xcode
$ open uscxml.xcodeproj

You can of course reuse the same source directory for many build directories.

Linux

Depending on your distribution, you will most likely have apt-get or yum available as package managers. If you do not, I'll have to assume that you are knowledgable enough to resolve build dependencies on your own.

Note: If you need the ECMAscript data-model, we advise to use one of the javascriptcoregtk packages as the JavaScriptCore API is far more stable than V8. uSCXML will build with version 3.23 of V8 as it is currently distributed with MacPorts.

Preparing apt-get based distributions

This would be all distributions based on Debian, like Ubuntu, Linux Mint and the like.

# build system and compiler
$ sudo apt-get install git cmake cmake-curses-gui make g++

# uscxml required dependencies (built if not installed)
$ sudo apt-get install libxerces-c-dev libevent-dev libcurl4-openssl-dev

# optional dependencies for language bindings
$ sudo apt-get install ant swig liblua5.2-0-dev mono-devel

There may still be packages missing due to the set of dependencies among packages in the various distributons. Try to run CMake and resolve dependencies until you are satisfied.

Preparing yum based distributions

This would be all distributions based on Redhat, e.g. Fedora.

# build system and compiler
$ sudo yum install git cmake cmake-gui gcc-c++

# uscxml required dependencies
$ sudo yum install xerces-c-devel libevent-devel libcurl-devel

Console / Make

Instructions are a literal copy of building uscxml for MacOSX on the console from above:

$ cd <USCXML_SRCDIR>
$ mkdir -p build/cli && cd build/cli
$ cmake ../..
[...]
-- Build files have been written to: .../build/cli
$ make

You can test whether everything works by starting the uscxml-browser with a test.scxml file:

$ ./bin/uscxml-browser ../../test/w3c/null/test436.scxml

Eclipse CDT

Note: Eclipse does not like the project to be a subdirectory in the source. You have to choose your build directory with the generated project accordingly.

$ mkdir -p ~/Desktop/build/uscxml/eclipse && cd ~/Desktop/build/uscxml/eclipse
$ cmake -G "Eclipse CDT4 - Unix Makefiles" <USCXML_SRCDIR>
[...]
-- Build files have been written to: .../build/uscxml/eclipse

Now open Eclipse CDT and import the out-of-source directory as an existing project into workspace, leaving the "Copy projects into workspace" checkbox unchecked. There are some more detailed instruction available in the CMake wiki as well.

Windows

Building from source on windows is somewhat more involved and instructions are necessarily in prose form. These instructions were created using Windows 7 and MS Visual Studio 2012.

Prepare compilation

1. Use git to checkout the source from git://github.com/tklab-tud/uscxml.git into any convenient directory.
2. Start the CMake-GUI and enter the checkout directory in the "Where is the source code" text field. Choose any convenient directory to build the binaries in.
3. Hit Configure and choose your toolchain and compiler - I only tested with Visual Studio 12. Hit Configure again until there are no more red items in the list. If these instructions are still correct and you did as described above, you should be able to "Generate" the Visual Project Solution.

Now you can generate the MS Visual Studio project file <USCXML_BUILDIR>/uscxml.sln. Just open it up to continue in your IDE.

Note: We only tested with the MSVC compiler. You can try to compile with MinGW but you would have to conditionalize the build scripts for e.g. MinGW.

Raspberry Pi

To compile uSCXML on Raspberry Pi you will need to, at a minimum, install the following packages. This assumes that you run Raspberry, the Debian variant.

$ sudo apt-get install cmake libxerces-c libcurl4-gnutls-dev

Now you can compile uSCXML like on any other platform:

$ git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/tklab-tud/uscxml.git
$ mkdir -p uscxml/build/raspberry && cd uscxml/build/raspberry
$ cmake ../..
$ make

If you want an ECMAScript datamodel or LUA, you will need to install additional packages:

# additional datamodels: ECMAScript, LUA
$ sudo apt-get install libjavascriptcoregtk-3.0-dev liblua5.2-dev

Finally, to get the language bindings install SWIG and the developer kits of the respective language. Older Java versions will work as well (>= 1.5), just make sure JAVA_HOME is set correctly.

# language bindings: Java, CSharp
$ sudo apt-get install swig ant oracle-java8-jdk mono-mcs
$ echo $JAVA_HOME
/usr/lib/jvm/jdk-8-oracle-arm-vfp-hflt

Language Bindings

In order to build any language bindings, you will need to have SWIG and the development kit of your target language installed. The set of available language bindings is printed at the end of the CMake invocation:

$ cmake <USCXML_SRC>
...
--   Available custom elements ...... : respond file postpone fetch 
--   Available language bindings .... : csharp java
-- General information:
...

Java

We are relying on CMake's FindJNI.CMake module to find the JNI headers and respective libraries. On unices, it's easiest to check whether jni.h is available in JAVA_HOME:

$ find $JAVA_HOME -name jni.h
/usr/lib/jvm/java-7-openjdk-i386/include/jni.h

In addition, you will need apache's ant in the path or in $ENV{ANT_HOME}/bin:

$ ant -version
Apache Ant(TM) version 1.8.2 compiled on September 22 2011

If both of these are given, you ought to get java as an available language binding and a new target called java for your build system. If you used plain Makefiles (default on unices), you will get everything you need via:

$ make && make jar
$ ls lib/*.jnilib lib/*.jar
lib/libuscxmlNativeJava64.jnilib lib/uscxml.jar

The uscxml.jar is to be added to your project's classpath, while the libuscxmlNativeJava64.jnilib (or .so, .dll) needs to be loaded once via System.load() before you can use native objects.

CSharp

For the CSharp bindings, we need to find either csc.exe from the Microsoft.NET framework or dmcs from the mono project. We search the following places for these:

$ENV{CSC_HOME}; $ENV{DMCS_HOME}
"C:/Windows/Microsoft.NET/Framework/v3.5"
"C:/Windows/Microsoft.NET/Framework/v4.0.30319"

If we find one of those binaries (and SWIG obviously), we will enable the language bindings.

$ which dmcs
/opt/local/bin/dmcs

Again, if you used plain Makefiles, you will get everything you need via:

$ make && make csharp
$ find lib -type f -iname *csharp*
lib/csharp/libuscxmlNativeCSharp.so
lib/uscxmlCSharp.dll

The libuscxmlNativeCSharp.so has to be available to your C# runtime, either by installing it in /usr/local/lib or (preferred) by using LD_PRELOAD or SetDllDirectory. See the embedding examples. The uscxmlCSharp.dll contains the managed code portion and needs to be added to your C# project as a reference.

Note: You cannot use uSCXML with Xamarin Studio / Mono on Mac out of the box, as they <emph>still</emph> have no 64Bit support. The last Macintosh without 64Bit support was the (late 2006) Mac Mini with an Intel Core Duo.

Important Note for Windows

You cannot use CMake projects generated for Visual Studio to build the target language specific part of the various bindings - you have to use nmake at a command prompt. Open a Visual Studio [x64 Win64] Command Prompt (2012) and type:

> cd c:\path\to\build\dir
> cmake -G"NMake Makefiles" c:\path\to\uscxml\source
...
> nmake && nmake csharp && nmake jar
...