Java and maven

TurkServer makes use of many Java packages, including the CometD implementation of the Bayeux protocol, the Amazon AWS MTurk SDK and a bunch of other open-source libraries including Guava and libraries from Apache Commons. Just by looking at the dependencies, you will probably get an idea of all the things that an experimental framework needs to do to get things to run smoothly and why it's difficult to run experiments well on MTurk.

Programming for TurkServer means you need to install all these dependencies correctly. But don't worry, there are great tools to do this for you, and actually creating experiments involves writing not much code at all. This is a short guide to getting a development environment set up so that you can create, test, and run experiments.

Maven and Eclipse

Maven is a build tool for Java that automatically resolves and installs dependencies. Gone are the days of downloading a billion jar files and keeping them up to date manually. You can use Maven from the command-line, but it has great integration with Eclipse, our IDE of choice. Eclipse is absolutely fantastic when working with Java and the Eclipse-Java combination is one of the best development environments that exist, in my opinion.

See the Quick Start guide for how to set up your development environment for TurkServer.