The Byte Code Engineering Library (BCEL) is written entirely in Java, so it should be fairly straightforward to get it set up and running in your environment. If you obtained an archive (.tar.gz, .ZIP), unpack it and let your CLASSPATH variable point to the unpacked directory. E.g. on UNIX system using the (t)csh
% setenv CLASSPATH ${CLASSPATH}:<BCEL>
where <BCEL> is the path to the unpacked directory.
If you obtained a .JAR file, just put it in your CLASSPATH, too:
% setenv CLASSPATH ${CLASSPATH}:<PathToDir>/BCEL.jar
You can also use the JAR file directly. Try:
% java -jar BCEL.jar java.lang.String
The BCEL can be used with any JDK >= 1.1. I have tested the Byte Code Engineering Library with the JDK 1.3 on Solaris and Linux and with VisualAge on WindowsNT.
The classes of this package should be already precompiled (depending on the distribution you downloaded). You can recompile the package by simply typing
% cd <BCEL> % make allclean % make JC=javac JFLAGS=-g % mkdir docs % make docs
where <BCEL> is the path to the unpacked directory. You will have to use GNU make. Typing
% cd <BCEL>/de/fub/bytecode % javac -g *.java */*.java
might work, too.