Welcome Developers!

Do you want to write a module for Betaville? Do you want to fix a bug? Maybe you just want to see what the innards look like! You've come to the right place.

Betaville is available under the free and open source BSD License.

This tutorial will teach you how to check out the sources and run the Betaville application. The in-development version of Betaville is based on NetBeans Platform and is most easily built by using the NetBeans IDE (7.1, currently). Version control is achieved by using Git via GitHub.

NOTE FOR MAC USERS

The current download of the Betaville application from the “download” button on the website is a webstart app. This is great for keeping your Betaville up to date, but requires a special bit of fuss for Mac users while Oracle gets the hang of maintaining the Java runtime.

In the interim, either download the full application per the instructions below, or revert your version of Java to 1.6.0_29. We've been able to run it with later versions once or twice, but not consistently. We'll be putting up a free-standing installer package in the next couple of weeks…

There are several good tutorials online for reverting to Java 6 from Java 7, but you'll need to do one extra trick if you have to revert from later versions of 1.6.0: download the 1.6.0_29 installer. If you try to install it over a later version, it will throw up an alert that only lets you close. However, you can open the same package using Pacifist from http://www.charlessoft.com/. Just say Yes when it asks if it should replace files and whatnot, and you'll be good to go.

This is simpler than the full download, the IDE, etc., but you use an older version of Java at your own risk. We'll get the .pkg up as soon as we can, assuming that Oracle won't have sorted the webstart issue to Apple's satisfaction any time soon.

NOTE FOR ECLIPSE USERS

If you prefer Eclipse for your IDE, there's an older version of this tutorial that covers the steps to take: http://wiki.betaville.net/doku.php?id=howto:check_out_and_run&rev=1295286365

Git is quite flexible in how it transmits files and changesets. GitHub encourages the use of SSH for retrieving and sending data, but also supports the HTTPS protocol. Let's first set up one of those.

• Create GitHub Account (or log in if you already have one)

To access the sources from within NetBeans:

1. Team → Git → Clone
2. Fill out the data as follows (replacing 'skyebook' with your own GitHub username)
3. Next
4. Select the Master branch
5. Next
6. Click through using the default settings on this last page

Congratulations! Once this process is completed you now have all of the code necessary to build and run Betaville on your computer. Now to run it…

Simply Right-Click the Betaville project and select Run