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Installation Guide

Pre-Requisites 

OpenRules requires:

• Java 2 Standard Edition: J2SE Development Kit release 1.5 or higher
• Apache Ant 1.6 or higher*
• MS Excel™ or OpenOffice™ or Google Docs (for rules and forms administration)
• Eclipse IDE for Java Developers  (for complex project management only).

OpenRules works in any operating environment with standard Java. OpenRules is based on and/or uses freely distributed Open Source software provided by different contributors and included in an OpenRules installation.

If you use Unix you are probably already well aware how to deal with Java and Ant.  If you use Windows and are not very familiar with Java/Ant configuration issues, below are straight-forward recommendations:

1. Install Windows Platform - J2SE Development Kit 6u1 (or later) from http://java.sun.com/javase/downloads/index.jsp.   Accept all defaults, and your JDK will be installed at c:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.6.0_xx, where xx - is an actual number of the release you downloaded
2. Install Current Release of Ant (1.6.5 or later) from http://ant.apache.org/bindownload.cgi.  By default, you will install it at c:/apache-ant-1.x.y  After the installation rename c:/apache-ant-1.x.y to c:/ant.
3. Now you want to set up your environment variables in a way similar to the one below:

   set ANT_HOME=c:\ant
   set JAVA_HOME=c:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.6.0_xx
   set PATH=%PATH%;%ANT_HOME%\bin;%JAVA_HOME%\bin

   To set up environment variables, left-click on the Windows Start button, then right-click on My Computer, and chose Properties.  Select the tab "Advanced" and then push "Environment Variables".  Add or correct User variables JAVA_HOME, ANT_HOME, and PATH accordingly.

4. Click on Start + Run and enter "cmd" to open a DOS window.  Type

   >java -version
   >ant -version

   to make sure that you use the correct versions of Java and Ant.

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