
This section will help you apply eXo Platform to your projects successfully by introducing eXo architecture and giving step-by-step instructions for you to build your own custom portal based on eXo Platform.

*Requirements:*

* JDK (Java Development Kit) 6.0 
* SVN 1.6+
* Maven 2.2.1+
* Tomcat 6.0.26 or JBoss 5.1.0

*Install and configure Maven:*

You need to add a system environment variable MAVEN_OPTS (it could be in a .profile startup script on Linux/MacOS operating systems or in the global environment variables panel on Windows).

* Windows:*
{code}
set MAVEN_OPTS=-Xshare:auto -Xms128M -Xmx1G -XX:MaxPermSize=256M
{code}

* Linux/MacOS:
{code}
export MAVEN_OPTS="-Xshare:auto -Xms128M -Xmx1G -XX:MaxPermSize=256M"
{code}


*Maven settings:*

Do as follows:

*Step 1:* Save the file {{settings.xml}} in {{HOME/.m2/settings.xml}}

*Step 2:* Edit and change the {{local-properties}} profile, including:

* {{exo.projects.directory.dependencies}} contains the application servers, and openfire.

* each {{exo.projects.app.AS-NAME.version}} contains the name and version of the application servers.

Note: 

If the settings.xml file has been existing, you can merge them all together. You will need the followings:

* The local-properties profile, which defines properties used to build application server distributions of our products.

* The [repository|http://repository.exoplatform.org/public] to download our dependencies.

