Since the first release we've included a plugin framework so webical could be extended by anyone who's interested. Now that we have some extra hands on the project, I've started to rework and extend the framework a bit starting from the backend plugins.
Details about the changes can be read on the
wiki, a couple of highlights:
- The plugin manifest has become a lot simpler. I've removed all kinds of per-file entries and added the option to include directories for classes and resources. Besides that I've included a couple of optional fields to describe the plugin a bit and declare it's dependency on a particular version of webical.
- It's now possible to include external libraries
- It should be possible to include configuration pages on a global scope and a per-user scope.
- The registration of the plugins is much more transparent now. The configuration pages are going to show a lot more helpfull information about the state of the plugins, the hooks they use/provide and much more.
Besides the enhancements to the framework itself we want to make developing plugins a bit easier. To accomplish this we're going to provide the following:
- A maven repository with the webical jar file (including nightly snapshots).
- A plugin howto.
- Javadoc and other reference material
A lot is still to be done, but this should all make into the next release.
