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Event Stream Intelligence: Esper & NEsper

Building Esper

You can start using Esper with the binary jar that is included in all distributions. There is no need to build your own kit at all unless your goal is to contribute - which would be very welcome of course.

You also do not need to build Esper to run the examples. Please follow the instructions in the readme file in the "examples/etc" folder to run the examples.

In Esper, all module builds are managed by Apache Maven 2.0 or above. The Esper engine itself can be build and unit tested via the below commands. The instructions below have last been tried using Maven 2.0.4. Maven can be downloaded from http://maven.apache.org/.

Once you unpack Esper then open a command window and change directory into the Esper top directory where the Maven project model file "pom.xml" is located. The file is in the directory "esper/esper".

If you have a filewall, you will need to change the proxy entry in Maven's setting.xml under your Maven installation directory. Sometimes Maven appears to have problems downloading repository library files, in that case please give the build a second try.

The commands to compile Esper, run all tests and install a jar file into Maven's repository is:

cd esper/esper
mvn install

Since release 2.0, the new version of ANTLR 3 and Maven plug-in for building ANTLR grammar files may return an error on the first build:

error(3):  cannot find tokens file esper/target/generated-sources/antlr/com/espertech/esper/epl/generated/EsperEPL2Grammar...

If you see the above error which is due to the Maven plug-in not recognizing a grammar build order, then please change directory to esper/target/generated-sources/antlr/com/espertech/esper/epl/generated and remove all files except the *token* files, and build again.

Note, in order to run all tests successfully, the following preconditions must be met:

  • For tests performing database joins to work, MySQL must be installed and available at connection string "jdbc:mysql://localhost/test?user=root&password=password" and the test table must be created from etc/regression/create_testdb.sql
  • For performance tests that assert against execution times the recommended minimum configuration is 1GB and Dual Core 2x1.8 GHz
  • If you are running the test suite from within an IDE, please use the following parameters: -Dlog4j.configuration=etc/infoonly_log4j.xml -Xms512M -Xmx512M

Similarly, the Esper IO library for input output adapters also build by the same commands:

cd esper/esperio
mvn install

Esper examples are a separate Maven project. The example codebase are contains JUnit tests. All examples can be build and run via these commands:

cd esper/examples
mvn test