Webical Development

A couple of weeks ago I suggested to support some additional services to make plugin development easier. Now I think we've come a long way. What's changed:

• The project structure is revised. We now have a parent project with two modules; webical-core (the jar plugin developers can depend on) and webical-war (This is the main artifact)
• We now have a snapshots maven repository. Nightly snapshots will be deployed here (including release versions of the war). We're investigating the possibility to deploy releases to the central maven repository
• The xsd is available online as well for reference by the plugin developers
• I've committed my first efforts in creating a caldav backend provider for webical. This is available in our new webical-plugin project's repository. Check it out!

Now these issues have been addressed I can finally continue with the plugin framework again.

Since the pluginframework is getting into shape and the first plugin is under heavy development I've started up a new project to house our plugin efforts. One of the main reasons behind setting up a separate project is a clean separation in svn, I've noticed that many projects have a polluted repository because they try to incorporate all sub-projects into it. A separate repository also gives the opportunity to be somewhat more lenient with commit rights, it's not my intention to keep this reserved for webical developers alone. It also gives a separate tracker, forum and more.

The project can be found at sourceforge I'll check in the first plugin (a CalDav provider) as soon as possible. If anyone is interested in joining the effort just drop a note on the developers mailinglist (The same goes for Webical itself btw).

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.