Plugins - Wow!

[Stefan Arentz <st...@gmail.com>]

I just installed the JSP examples through:

 java -jar $GERONIMO_HOME/bin/deployer.jar --user system --password manager \
    search-plugins http://www.geronimoplugins.com/repository/geronimo-1.1

Which I accidentally found while catching up with this list.

Wow. This is really nice! I can imagine telling the admins of my
current customer to download Geronimo and pointing it to the internal
plugin repository to turn a plain vanilla geronimo into a website
cluster node or a backend component. This will make my life so much
easier :-)

Some questions though:

Will standard components like ActiveMQ and Derby also become available
as plugins? It would be really nice to simply start with
geronimo-minimal and then just add those components that you need.

When I installed the JSP Examples component it also installed
commons-collections-.3.1. But when I undeployed the examples, it kept
the commons-collections in the repository. I know this is very tricky,
but maybe it is nice to have a 'uninstall-plugin' command that also
purges dependencies that are not referenced anymore.

Documentation :-) I have questions like what is a plugin, what does
the repository look like, how do I build my own plugin, etc. Is there
anything available now that I can start with? I have some ideas for
plugins and I can easily document one of them on my blog. I just have
no idea where to start now.

 S.

Re: Plugins - Wow!

[Aaron Mulder <am...@alumni.princeton.edu>]

On 6/16/06, Stefan Arentz <st...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I just installed the JSP examples through:
>
>  java -jar $GERONIMO_HOME/bin/deployer.jar --user system --password manager \
>     search-plugins http://www.geronimoplugins.com/repository/geronimo-1.1
>
> Which I accidentally found while catching up with this list.
>
> Wow. This is really nice! I can imagine telling the admins of my
> current customer to download Geronimo and pointing it to the internal
> plugin repository to turn a plain vanilla geronimo into a website
> cluster node or a backend component. This will make my life so much
> easier :-)
>
> Some questions though:
>
> Will standard components like ActiveMQ and Derby also become available
> as plugins? It would be really nice to simply start with
> geronimo-minimal and then just add those components that you need.

Yes.  We had that working a while back but haven't maintained the
metadata for it.  After the release I'm planning to put the
configurations like ActiveMQ, OpenEJB, and Derby back out there as
upgrades from the minimal web distribution, as well as a consolidated
upgrade that will convert the web distribution to a full J2EE
distribution.

> When I installed the JSP Examples component it also installed
> commons-collections-.3.1. But when I undeployed the examples, it kept
> the commons-collections in the repository. I know this is very tricky,
> but maybe it is nice to have a 'uninstall-plugin' command that also
> purges dependencies that are not referenced anymore.

Maybe.  Currently we're planning to attack the "slim server" objective
in a slightly different way, which is to let you export a server
configuration containing only the modules you need to run your
application(s).  It would also be possible to have a "cleanse
repository" option to remove everything that's not in use.

> Documentation :-) I have questions like what is a plugin, what does
> the repository look like, how do I build my own plugin, etc. Is there
> anything available now that I can start with? I have some ideas for
> plugins and I can easily document one of them on my blog. I just have
> no idea where to start now.

See my answer to the other ("dummies guide") thread.  If you have your
module running in Geronimo, there's little to do to make it a plugin
other than fill out a web form with the plugin metadata (name,
license, etc.).  If you have other non-Geronimo modules as
dependencies, you may need to go through this more than once, but it
should be pretty straightforward. Making a repository is a little more
complex becauase it has more metadata files, but it follows the
standard Maven 2 repository format with only one additional
geronimo-plugins.xml file in the root of the repo (containing the
consolidated metadata for all the plugins in the repo).

Thanks,
    Aaron