code_swarm is an experiment in organic software visualization.
See https://vis.cs.ucdavis.edu/~ogawa/codeswarm for a picture of what we want
to produce.
Google Code Project :      https://code.google.com/p/codeswarm/
Google Group/Mailing List: https://groups.google.com/group/codeswarm 
# Building #
More detail is available at https://code.google.com/p/codeswarm/wiki/HowtoBuild
This quick guide explains how to setup your development environment to build
and run code_swarm.
## Prerequisites ##
You will need Apache's "ant" build tool, at least version 5 of the Java SDK from Sun, and for some features, Python 
version 2.4 or later.
### Linux ###
This guide is written with a Debian based Linux, Ubuntu 8.04. The process is likely
to be similar with other linux distributions.
This should ensure that ant and java6 are installed and configured:
    sudo apt-get install ant 
    sudo apt-get install sun-java6-jdk 
    sudo update-java-alternatives -s java-6-sun 
You should also ensure that Python is installed.
### Windows ###
* download ant for all platforms at https://ant.apache.org/bindownload.cgi
* unpack it where you want it to be installed, and add the location of
  its binaries to the the `PATH` environment variable. For instance, add at the end : 
  `C:\apache-ant-1.7.0\bin;` 
* download Sun Java SDK at https://java.sun.com/javase/downloads/index.jsp
* install it and add the "javac" Java compiler to the PATH : 
  `C:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.6.0_06\bin;`
* then create a new environment variable called JAVA_HOME and set its path to 
  `C:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.6.0_06;`
* download and install Python from https://www.python.org/download/
### Mac ###
Recent versions of OS X come with a good java compiler and Python interpreter, so all you need to do is get and install 
Apache ant.
If you have DarwinPorts/MacPorts, you can simply:
    sudo port install apache-ant
## Getting the source code ##
code_swarm is still a very young project.  At the moment, the best way to get it going is to download the source code 
and build it.
### git ###
A git fork of the main code_swarm repository is maintained at <https://github.com/rictic/code_swarm/tree/master>
This fork contains a number of patches which improve the speed of `code_swarm` significantly, as well as the 
`code_swarm` executable, which makes visualizing a new project on Linux and the Mac a one-step process.  
To obtain a clone of the repository, simply use:
    git clone git://github.com/rictic/code_swarm.git
    
### Subversion ###
code_swarm's source code is on a Google Code Subversion repository (svn) :
https://codeswarm.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/
See Subversion homepage at https://subversion.tigris.org/ for all appropriate 
tools and documents. I would recommend [TortoiseSVN](https://tortoisesvn.tigris.org/) for Windows users. 
Unix-like users would get their native "Subversion" package.
For more information, see https://code.google.com/p/codeswarm/source/checkout
## Building and Running ##
With Java and ant installed, and the `code_swarm` source downloaded, running `code_swarm` on any given git, svn, or hg 
based project is quite easy.
* Add `code_swarm/bin` to your PATH.  A line like `export PATH=$PATH:/path/to/code_swarm/bin` in your `~/.profile` or 
`~/.bash_profile` should do it
* `$ cd project/to/visualize`
* `$ code_swarm`
### Other ways of running code_swarm ###
There are a couple of other ways of invoking code_swarm.  For an experimental GUI where you can specify a svn url to 
visualize:
* cd path/to/code_swarm
* ant run
While code_swarm was developed to visualize source code repositories, its input format is generic, and some have 
experimented with visualizing other collaborative environments, including user activity on wikis and freebase.com.
code_swarm can be invoked by pointing it at a project config file, which contains a number of options for customizing 
the visualization.  The config file must point at a repository xml file, which contains a set of events, which each 
describe a file, edited by a person, at a specific time.  The time is specified as the number of milliseconds since 
January 1st, 1970.
Example config files can be seen in `data/sample.config` and `bin/config.template`
To invoke `code_swarm` with a given config file, use `./run.sh path/to/project.config`
Other commands:
* `ant` will build, but not run the project
* `ant all` will also generate Javadoc HTML documentation
* `ant clean` will delete all intermediate and binary files