RHQ plugin development enhancements

Lukas Krejci lkrejci at redhat.com
Tue Aug 28 12:52:46 UTC 2012


+100 to an Eclipse plugin.
Having a featureful/more graphical plugin descriptor editor in Eclipse would 
be great (our XSDs are very well documented and editing the plugin descriptor 
XML in Eclipse is actually quite a pleasant experience, but with Eclipse 
plugin we can go even futher - like automatically add facets to the component 
classes, etc).

+100 to a graphical integration with the standalone container - how cool would 
that be to have to leave your IDE and test your plugin interactively. But I 
must say that while the standalone container is quite powerful, I find its CLI 
quite terse and hard to remember (also having command history would help  
there ;) ) - if we were to integrate it to an IDE, the standalone pc's CLI 
should be given some love.

Just my 2c.

On Tuesday, August 28, 2012 08:10:19 Simeon Pinder wrote:
> The act of writing an RHQ plugin is how one integrates a management product
> into the RHQ management space.  While the process is fairly well
> documented(https://docs.jboss.org/author/display/RHQ/Plugin+Community),
> there is still quite a lot of initial investment for a user new to RHQ
> development and even more when integrating management products not based in
> java.
> 
> I think we can significantly improve the plugin development and maintenance
> process by putting some more effort in the following areas: Development:
>    - Add more graphical tooling around plugin development to
>       a)lower the barrier to entry for new management products
>       b)shorten the feedback loop during plugin development
>  Testing:
>    - Document some best practices and a reference implementation for testing
> plugins Deployment/Runtime versions:
>    - Document some best practices for Deployment/Runtime versioning of
> plugins
> 
> While the enhancements around Testing and Runtime versions of plugins can be
> considered more advanced topics about how to be more consistent and robust
> among all available plugins and versions, the enhancements around graphical
> tooling for plugin development seem fundamental to increasing plugin
> developer productivity and more pressing.
> 
> Specifically around graphical plugin development tooling, the following seem
> like good enhancement areas to start in: - graphical plugin descriptor
> creation. This can be a standalone or integrated part of a Swing|Eclipse
> plugin|Forge application. - graphical maven plugin generator. The current
> command line version works to create an initial setup but a graphical
> wizard would be vastly more helpful. - graphical integration with both
> standalone plugin container AND lightweight configuration editor for faster
> plugin development/testing.  Such a graphical tool would likely have an
> RHQ/JON installation as a dependency to ease dependency/setup/requirements.
> - Additionally you'd want to support the ability of the developer to insert
> sample/mock values to simulate how the plugin code will respond. - a few
> short videos/wink demos showing how to develop i)java plugin ii)java
> plugins utilizing scripting iii)non-java plugin
> 
> * For all of the above we should be mindful of two recent enhancements,
> listed below, which enable greater integration of non-java management
> plugins.  Assuming a java and/or jboss AS stack for development may no
> longer be a valid assumption for all plugin developers.
> http://pilhuhn.blogspot.de/2012/07/jar-less-plugins-for-rhq.html
> http://pilhuhn.blogspot.de/2012/07/introducing-no-op-plugin-for-rhq.html
> 
> What do others people think about this?  Any other enhancements areas that
> we should add to this list?  I think such a fundamental part of the RHQ
> management framework should be easier to use and the productivity gains
> will be substantial.
> 
> -Simeon
> 
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