Plugin tutorial under construction

Hello Douglas,

DB> I'm working on my first plugin for IDEA, and I'm documenting my
DB> learning experience in a "tutorial" for writing plugins.
DB>
DB> It's very, very incomplete at this point (as my plugin isn't done
DB> yet!),but it's not a bad first step for someone starting out, and
DB> will hopefully soften the learning curve somewhat.
DB>
DB> You can find it at:
DB> http://www.nurflugel.com/idea/Writing_plugins_for_IDEA.html
DB>
DB> Comments are welcome.

It's not quite correct to say that there are application, project or module
plugins. Every IntelliJ IDEA plugin can have multiple components of different
types. For example, the standard DevKit plugin (its source code is included
in the Plugin Development Package) contains several application components
and several module components. The application components provide the global
functionality (registering the plugin module type and the IDEA JDK type),
and the module components provide features specific to plugin modules. Of
course, the components are used for much more than configuration.

Otherwise it's pretty good - keep up writing, and thanks for posting the
notice here!

--
Dmitry Jemerov
Software Developer
JetBrains, Inc.
http://www.jetbrains.com
"Develop with pleasure!"

Dmitry Jemerov (JetBrains) wrote:

For example, the standard DevKit plugin (its source code is included in the Plugin
Development Package)

That's about the worst plugin to start with as the source distribution is kinda broken:
It's missing most of the package structure which makes it quite hard to guess what belongs
where and the plugin.xml has to be grabbed from the jar. I had a go on it and learned it
the hard way: IDEA-6034 ;)

Sascha

Hello Sascha,

>> For example, the standard DevKit plugin (its source code is included
>> in the Plugin Development Package)
>>
SW> That's about the worst plugin to start with as the source
SW> distribution is kinda broken: It's missing most of the package
SW> structure which makes it quite hard to guess what belongs where and
SW> the plugin.xml has to be grabbed from the jar. I had a go on it and
SW> learned it the hard way: IDEA-6034 ;)

It's not broken, it's really structured that way - our .ipr file for DevKit
uses package prefixes to reduce the size of the directory structure.

Also, none of the plugin source archives in the plugin development package
currently include plugin.xml. We plan to inlclude plugin.xml and DevKit-compatible
.ipr files for all plugins in the plugin development package soon.

--
Dmitry Jemerov
Software Developer
JetBrains, Inc.
http://www.jetbrains.com
"Develop with pleasure!"