The intent of this tutorial is to assist you in setting up an update site to add plugins/features to Ergo-EQ. The update site is a really nice feature of Eclipse that allows others to add functionality to Ergo-EQ without including them as part of the core platform.
Prerequisites:
Assuming that you have a good understanding of the prerequisites, the first thing to do is to go through this Eclipse wiki page that provides very basic instructions for creating an update site.
There are some parts of the feature.xml that you will want to update. Some of these updates will also be done to the plugin or plugins that are part of the feature.
In the Overview tab, at a minimum you should provide:
In this section, you should provide users with information about your feature. For example, you should at a minimum provide:
In the plug-ins tab, list all plug-ins and fragments that should be packaged in the feature. Optionally, you can specify a specific version of a plugin.
This tab should list the dependent features and/or plug-ins for the feature to be installed. This is used by the update mechanism in Ergo-EQ to determine what dependencies should be satisfied to install the feature. This prevents incomplete features from being installed and breaking the application.
This section will briefly describe the part(s) of the MANIFEST.MF that are relevant for creating the update site. This is not intended to be an exhaustive overview of the MANIFEST, for more details see the Eclipse Help guide.
In the overview tab, the following information should be provided:
The site.xml defines what features the update site has available. The next section will discuss the different parts of the site.xml.
It's recommended that you add 1 or more categories to organize your features in the site map tab and that you keep features small in size (e.g. as few plug-ins as possible). The categories will help users determine what each feature contains (e.g. Buildings, Bridges, etc) and keeping the features small will allow users to only install what they want (e.g. don't group buildings/bridges/networks/etc in the same feature). After you have created the categories and added your features to them, if you click the Build All button you will see a features and plugins folder created along with an artifacts.jar and content.jar. Those created files/folders along with the site.xml is what will go in your update site folder. See the next section for details.
Setting up the update site is fairly straightforward. If you an Apache or equivalent web-server installed on a machine (for this tutorial we'll assume Apache on an Ubuntu machine), then all you need to do is copy the following to the web server's root folder /var/www/:
After copying those files to your web server root folder, you can test your update site by launching Ergo-EQ and doing the following: