Forge is a rapid-application development tool focused on a shell-based interface with application developers.  The SwitchYard project has a set of plugins for Forge which dramatically decrease the amount of time needed to create a new application.  If you plan to develop SwitchYard applications, we highly recommend using the Forge or Eclipse tooling (or both!).

The first step is to install Forge itself, which is covered nicely in the Forge documentation.  Please be sure to download Forge 1.0.2 Final, which can be found here.  As part of installation, be sure to setup the $FORGE_HOME environment variable.

Once Forge is installed it's time to install the SwitchYard extensions to Forge.  The easiest way to install them is to download the SwitchYard Installer and run:

ant install

The installer will ask if you want to install other pieces of the distribution aside from the Forge tooling.  Just answer 'no' to any pieces that you don't want to install.

For more details on using the Forge tooling for SwitchYard, please see the User Guide.