[Bluemusic-users] Plugins SDK

[Steven Yi <ste...@gm...>]

HI All,

I managed to put together a new plugin loader (mentioned on
bluemusic-devel) that loads plugins from jar files.  This will become
the new preferred method for users to build their own plugins.  For
the new Jar Plugins, users will not have to touch the registry.xml
(which will eventually go away), and all that will be necessary is to
drop a jar file of your plugin(s) into the plugin folder and it will
be automatically loaded at runtime (already implemented).

I am working now on a set of example plugins for each of the plugin
types and have set up an ant build file.  For plugin building, it
should be as simple as making a copy of the examplePlugins folder,
modifying the template plugins, compile (which puts the jar in the
users plugin folder) and test.

Documentation will be written too after the above is finished and
tested.  So far I've managed already to build a semi-functional plugin
of each type, have them compiled, and was ready and usable next time I
started up blue.

This will altogether be the Plugins SDK that will be included with
blue in future releases (probably not the one I'll be doing tonight,
but from there after).  Hopefully this will minimize the curve for
blue plugin programming to the simplest it could possibly be.

Just wanted to let everyone know as I'm pretty excited by it!  ^_^

Thanks!
steven