As Drools is an open source project, instructions for building from source are part of the manual ! Building from source means you can stay on top with the latest features. Whilst aspects of Drools are quite complicated, many users have found ways to become contributors.
Drools works with JDK1.5 and above. you will need also need to have the following tools installed. Minimum requirement version numbers provided.
Ensure the executables for ant, maven and java are in your path. The examples given illustrative and are for a win32 system:
Path=D:\java\j2sdk1.5.0_8\bin;D:\java\apache-ant-1.7\bin;D:\java\maven-2.0.7\bin
Following environment variables will also need to be set. The examples given illustrative and are for a win32 system::
JAVA_HOME=D:\java\j2sdk1.5.0_8
ANT_HOME=D:\java\apache-ant-1.6.5
MAVEN_HOME=D:\java\maven-2.0.7
Past releases used to have an ant based build mechanism, but now maven is mandatory, although Ant is used internally in maven for document building proposes