Roleplaying games are a minefield of corner cases, exceptions, and house rules. This extends all the way down through to the way people use minis and minimaps. Unfortunately, of the dozens of online or computerized mapping systems we've seen over the years, a clear theme emerges. Developers invariably try to build a giant framework for playing in one particular way. Examples of this sort of behavior include incorporating character management tools into the whiteboard, through to requiring the use of fog-of-war mechanics.
At best, this ensures that the system has a steep learning curve, as unnecessary, complex mechanics are presented to end-users as first-class components of the system. Worse still, the emphasis on complex mechanics often distracts from and makes it more difficult for system developers to build the simpler, but less interesting (though often far more necessary) aspects of the system. The lack of support for simpler features typically makes the system far less attractive to gaming groups other than the ones the developer is part of.
Hugin is designed with the philosophy that your gaming tools shouldn't tell you how to play the game. Hugin takes a bottom up design approach, providing users with one simple, but extremely general tool: A shared whiteboard with the ability to place and manipulate miniatures on it. More complex functionality (e.g., scripting miniatures, fog of war, etc...) can be built on top of this primitive functionality. However, Hugin can be used effectively without a user even knowing that these tools exist.
Hugin is designed to cleanly act as a multiplatform application. Because Hugin is written in ObjectiveJ, once it's set up on the server, it's set up. Players do not need to install, update, or manage software other than an HTML 5 web browser (Mozilla, Safari, etc...). Users don't need to deal with the hassles of Java, Flash, or a pain-in-the-ass to deploy scripting language solution. Hell, Hugin is even iOS compatible.
Before compiling, you'll need the cappuccino distribution (specifically capp and jake), which you can download and install from the Cappuccino Website. Without capp and jake, you won't be able to compile Hugin, but you can still run the uncompiled version out of the source release directory by copying the Frameworks directory from the Cappuccino demo project into the root level of the source release.
Download the Hugin source release
svn co https://hugin-mapper.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/hugin-mapper
cd hugin-mapper
Install the cappuccino frameworks in the Hugin directory.
capp gen -f
Compile. This step is optional; the SVN repository's contents can be served directly. The compiled version will be generated in Build/Debug/Hugin or Build/Release/Hugin.
make [release]