Hive is fairly straightforward to compile. We develop Hive in Linux using standard shell tools.
The hardest part of building Hive is setting up your CLASSPATH correctly. It is important that the Hive sources be in your CLASSPATH, as well as the final destination where thing are being compiled. It is much better not to compile the .class files in the same directory as the sources.
To compile Hive, you will need several tools.
GNU make. We make heavy use of GNU make, if you do not have a recent version such as 3.77 it probably will not work.
A Java 1.1 JDK
jikes, a fast Java compiler. Available from http://www.ibm.com/research/jikes
Download the hive sources. They come in two packages, hivebase and hiveapps. Unpack them: they will create two directories, base and apps. Put those directories in your CLASSPATH.
We do not use any fancy IDE for Hive. It is possible to compile Hive in Windows by installing just a few programs. Note: Hive doesn't work very well in Windows 95, we recommend Windows NT for robust networking. Or Linux!
You need GNU make. A small free version is mingw32, available from http://agnes.dida.physik.uni-essen.de/~janjaap/mingw32/index.html.
You also need touch, a trivial shell program. There are millions of these out there, the one I got was from the Unix 95 collection at http://www.itribe.net/virtunix/mystuff.html.
An alternative is to use the Cygwin environment. Instructions for compiling Hive with that will be gratefully accepted.