FreeBongo Builder 1.2

Readme Information


Introduction

The Builder is an easy-to-use, yet powerful Graphical User Interface (GUI) builder. In conjunction with the FreeBongo Runtime, it provides fast, efficient GUI development. Build your application in much less time.

This is a FreeBongo release. FreeBongo is the open-source Java GUI project. Join the bongo-interest mailing list to keep up to date.


System Requirements

The Builder will work in Java 1.1 or Java 2 (JDK1.2) environments. Java 1.1.7 or above is recomended. You can get Sun's JDK from the JavaSoft site.

JDK1.0.x is NOT supported.

Also, the FreeBongo Runtime 1.2 is required. Depending on your download, you may have to download it separately. To determine this, see if the file freebongo.jar exists in the lib subdirectory where you installed the Builder. If so, the Runtime has been downloaded.


Installation

The various releases from FreeBongo are all packaged so as to fit together once on your machine. Most of them are independent of each other, but they work together nicely.

To install the FreeBongo Builder, three things need to be done.

  1. Extract the contents of the Builder archive

  2. If you have previously installed releases from FreeBongo, you may wish to put this one in the same root directory. This way, everything FreeBongo-related is in the one place. You may put it wherever you like, however.
  3. Put the installation path into the FB_HOME system variable.

  4. If you are running Windows95/98, and installed the Builder into C:\freebongo, add the following line to your autoexec.bat file.

    set FB_HOME=c:\freebongo

  5. (Optional) Put fb-builder.jar and freebongo.jar onto your CLASSPATH

  6. You will need to put the path to the JAR files on your classpath. If you are using Windows95/98 edit your autoexec.bat file and add the following line somewhere after where you set FB_HOME:

    set CLASSPATH=%FB_HOME%\lib\fb-builder.jar;%FB_HOME%\lib\freebongo.jar;%CLASSPATH%

    You will then have to restart your computer for the changes to be recognised.

You're done!


Usage

To get the Builder going, you simply need to execute the fb.bat batch file under Windows, or the fb shell script under Solaris or Unix. This will bring up the Builder's user interface.


Documentation

Included in this release are: