Sphinx4 from a C background : first few steps

As I set out earlier,  one of my goals is to grok all of the components.  I challenged myself to work with Java, which I feel less proficient than my C/C++/Python/Perl.

What should you think when you go from one language to another?  One and only one answer : don't make a judgement too early.  

For example, compilation of Sphinx4 takes 4 steps:

1. Download and install JDE. 
2. Download and install ant. 
3. run ant

If you haven't used JDE, ant or never look at a build.xml, you would feel a bit overwhelmed.    But be patient, there are a lot of goodies of Java.  Most of them are very well thought in terms of software engineering. 

I followed the process.  Woa,  Sphinx 4 is now at beta 6 and it grows to 366 files.   Sounds like groking it will take some time then. 

So what would be your strategy if you want to go forward to understand a Java project such as Sphinx4?   My suggestion: download a good IDE such as Eclipse or NetBeans.

If you are like me, coming from a emacs background, learning Eclipse would take you sometime as well.   But again: don't make a judgement too early.  Eclipse is nice in its own way.  (At least it's not Visual X.....)    

Practically, using Eclipse to understand the code also has its advantage.  Unlike C-package organization, Java software usually has deep directory hierarchy.  Using emacs would definitely cause you more keystrokes.  The only exception I know of is JDEE.  That again will take you some setup time.

In any case, I got it started.  So, my next goal is to go through all materials of Sphinx 4 again.  This time I demand myself to grok.   I will start from the Sphinx 4 documentation page.  Then expand to source code-level of undersand. 

Arthur