Suggestion: update the build documentation and add automated builds to keep an eye on it

[gigafone]

I've found that the Building Esper documentation could be improved. When a project doesn't easily build and the documentation doesn't help, it leads to a bad developer experience.

I'm working my way through getting Esper's project-root maven build to work. As a minimal starting point, this is what I'm currently using:

mvn -DskipTests -Dgpg.skip=true install

I'd suggest this be added to the Esper documentation.

Also, I found in #34 that the build did not succeed for the current master.

Perhaps this situation could be improved by adding an automated build?

[gigafone]

One commit to help move this issue forward is here: gigafone@9f2eaf0

There is more to do after this. I recommend:

• Test the build -- by hand -- on a fresh machine, from the perspective of an outside (e.g. non EsperTech) contributor. (To be clear, this is what I'm doing.) I'm asking that someone from EsperTech please do the same, because I think it will reveal bugs in the process (the ones I'm chasing down).
• Setup automated builds. The idea here is to catch mistakes earlier -- such as the UTF-8 bug I found. I'm asking that someone from EsperTech set this up, because only the project owners have that permission. CircleCI, for example, offers free CI builds for open source projects.

[bernhardttom]

updated "building" page at http://espertech.com/esper/building.php

We will look at why builds can fail in other environments.