How To Set-Up a Development Environment for WebApp Component Plugins

This procedure describes a development environment that can be used to increase your productivity in writing plugins for the WebApp Component.

You will need a recent Eclipse EE and standalone version of Oxygen XML Editor with the WebApp Component Add-on installed.

Note: If you do not have a valid Oxygen XML Editor license, then you will need to use the standard procedure of testing the plugin.

Developing a plugin for the WebApp Component might require repetitive coding-testing cycle. Since the process of building a whole SDK project requires a full Maven build, the whole process might prove to be time consuming. The following procedure provide a faster alternative way of testing the plugin:

Setup an SDK sample project as described in this tutorial
Copy one of the sample plugins found in oxygen-sample-plugins/ in the SDK project to the plugins folder of the oXygen XML Standalone installation.
The plugin will also be used by the Oxygen XML Editor standalone distribution, which has some advantages. However, if Oxygen XML Editor standalone is not compatible with your plugin, it might display error messages at startup. In this case, you can disable it by following this procedure.
Import the copied plugin in Eclipse.
1. Click File > Import
2. Choose Existing Maven Project
3. Browse for the location where you copied the plugin
Modify the plugin.xml to add a library reference to the directory where Eclipse places the compiled output.
With the default setup of a Maven project, this step requires to add the following element:
```
<library name="target/classes/"/>
```
You can now open a document in Oxygen XML Editor standalone and start the WebApp Component with the plugin installed, just by using the Start WebApp Editor button on the Oxygen XML Editor standalone toolbar.
Every time you make changes to the plugin sources, you will need to restart the WebApp Component using the Close and Stop Server button.

Once you are happy with the result, you need to add the plugin back in your SDK project and follow these instructions to perform a final testing of the project.