One of my favorite additions to FlexDeploy in the 4.0 release is the Plugin Software Development Kit(SDK). The FlexDeploy Plugin SDK is a collection of materials and Java code designed to support the development of plugins for FlexDeploy. FlexDeploy has always had a great selection of plugins that meet many use cases, and there is almost always a way to complete any task with a scripting plugin as noted in “No Plugin, No Problem“. But with the Plugin SDK, Flexagon is making the move to allow customers and partners to develop plugins for the application as well. This will allow the conglomeration of plugins to grow faster than ever.
The SDK is IDE-agnostic. Feel free to build a FlexDeploy plugin using Eclipse, JDeveloper, or any Java IDE of your choice.
Building a FlexDeploy plugin is easy! The example is a plugin with 4 operations, and several JUnit tests. Writing tests is optional, but simple with the mock class provided. I spent under 4 hours creating the plugin which can start, stop, and deploy artifacts to Apache Http Server 2.2 or 2.4. The plugin consists of the Java classes necessary to perform the operations you select, an XML file that describes the operations, and an XML file that describes the project and environment/instance properties that your operations require.
So, how do you start?
The SDK is available to as shown below:
Download the SDK from flexagon.com
Look through the sample plugin source
See the finished sample plugin jar file
and try your own. When you are finished, upload it to FlexDeploy just like any other plugin.
