Installing Software Required for GeoEco Development

Before you can write code for GeoEco, you must install some utilities, compilers, and programming libraries. Nearly all of these are free and we hope to keep it that way in the future.

Required software

Either Windows XP or Windows Server 2003, with the latest service pack

Plus your choice of C++ compiler:

Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2003

or all of these:

You also need the most recent versions of:

Windows Updates
ArcGIS 9.1 with .NET Support installed
ArcGIS 9.1 Service Pack 2 (you need only install ArcGISDesktop91sp2.msp)
Python 2.4 for Windows
Python for Windows extensions (a.k.a. pywin32) for Python 2.4
NumPy for Windows and for Python 2.4
docutils for Python 2.4 (decompress .tgz file to a temp directory and run C:\Python24\python.exe install.py)
Python 2.5 for Windows
Python for Windows extensions (pywin32) for Python 2.5
NumPy for Windows and Python 2.5
docutils for Python 2.5 (decompress .tgz file to a temp directory and run C:\Python25\python.exe install.py)
PuTTY for Windows (choose the latest Windows installer executable, e.g. putty-0.60-installer.exe)
TortoiseSVN

Important notes

Python 2.4 and 2.5 are both needed if you intend to build GeoEco for both versions of Python. Because GeoEco includes Python extension modules written in C++ (it is not a "pure Python" implementation) the resulting installer files are Python-version-specific. A separate installer file must be built for each supported version of Python.

If you choose the free C++ compilers rather than Visual Studio .NET 2003:

You will not be able to build GeoEco for Python 2.4, because the Python 2.4 distutils module that we use to build the installation package requires Visual Studio .NET 2003. This limitation is ok for most developers because they usually only need to build the installation packages for private testing. The official GeoEco releases are always built with Visual Studio.
You will not be able to rebuild various C# utility programs that are part of GeoEco, such as CreateArcGISToolbox.exe or the various RegisterToolboxWithArcCatalog executables. This limitation is ok for most developers because the compiled executables are checked into the source tree and are rebuilt manually only when they change.

The compilers must be installed to their default locations in C:\Program Files! The build scripts will fail if they are installed elsewhere.

Even though the Platform SDK specifies Windows Server 2003 in the title, it is compatible with Windows XP. (You can verify this on Microsoft's download page.) You should install it regardless of whether you have Server 2003 or XP. Do not install a different version of the Platform SDK; the GeoEco build script is written to look for this version.

While GeoEco can be installed on Windows Vista, the installation packages cannot be built on Vista because the required C++ compilers are not supported by Microsoft on Vista. We use these to compile GeoEco's C++ Python extension modules. We selected these compilers because they were used by the Python team to compile the Windows versions of Python 2.4 and 2.5 and we want to ensure our modules are compatible. Also, as noted above, distutils specifically requires these compilers when building on Windows. Until Python and distutils use new compilers, we will continue to require Windows XP or Server 2003 for GeoEco development.

ArcGIS 9.1 is required because the GeoEco build script creates an ArcGIS geoprocessing toolbox (.tbx file). ArcGIS .NET components are required to create this toolbox. ArcGIS 9.2 cannot be used because the resulting toolbox will not be backward compatible with ArcGIS 9.1. When GeoEco stops supporting ArcGIS 9.1, a newer version will be used.

Numpy is required because some of the C++ extension modules use macros and types from Numpy's C header files. Docutils is required because the build script uses it to create the GeoEco documentation files.

GeoEco is not currently supported on operating systems other than Windows, although much of it is theoretically compatible. The core modules as well as the build and installation script, setup.py, were written to be operating system independent, although setup.py is currently written to raise an exception if you try it. Please contact us if you want to try it on other operating systems.

TODO: Describe optional software

Install MATLAB 2007b to build the MATLAB-based tools, or use --nomatlab switch when building.
Set up RAM disk as R: drive to speed up building of ArcGIS toolbox. For RAM disk driver, suggest ImDisk.