First of all, a general knowledge of UNIX (linux) and SQL are necessary to develop applications with Bond. Glade is also a helpful tool for creating graphical user interfaces (GUI's) for applications.
Bond is dependant on BondDB, PostgreSQL development libraries, GTK development libraries (GLib), and libxml2 (2.6 or later). Most of these packages you can get from your distribution. Under Debian the packages you're looking for are postgresql-dev, libgtk2.0-dev and libxml2-dev. You need to compile and install BondDB before you can install Bond.
Run ./configure in the BondDB directory to generate the needed make files. BondDB is included in the Bond download for your convenience - usually it is identical to the version available on the BondDB site.
Type make to compile the source files and then type make install to install BondDB. You may need root privileges to do make install.
After installing BondDB, the same process is used to install Bond.
A number of test programs reside in the src directories. dbtest in BondDB, testbond, testsoldier and bondfrontend in Bond. Use these test applications to check if the libraries work correctly.
Each test program has a corresponding appname.conf file which is its configuration file. These can be located in the current directory, /etc/bond/ or in /usr/local/etc/bond. In this file the database to connect to, bond xml file to load and other features are specified. Bond now has DTD validation so a program can be set to use validation if requested in the corresponding .conf file.
To test the installation by creating a postgres database use the following commands in the BondDB root directory:
createdb dbtest psql -f createtestdb.sql dbtest
Modify configuration files (.conf) in the src directory of both Bond and BondDB:
db_host = tyreal db_username = postgresuser db_password = postgrespass db_name = victory
Start running the tests by specifying the test number to run on the command line. For example: ./dbtest 1. Most tests should say TEST PASSED, otherwise TEST FAILED if something went wrong. testsoldier and bondfrontend are not command line tests, but fully fledged applications you can run for a more comprehensive test. If you run it and lots of windows pop up with information in the widgets you know everything is working well. Bond has another test program, testxml in the uigtk directory, to test just the graphical user interface part of Bond.
Other sources of information can be found in Bond and BondDB root directories. Both have README files which cover some problems that may arise in the installation process.