Just to get things started

[rincewind23]

I've just sent something I've been working on to Thomas so he can hopefully post it up somewhere - read the rest of the post as if you have a link here and I'll update when I get the link.

In case you don't want to start from scratch. Unfortunately I haven't been able to get it to run in a "real" Eclipse instance (using the Export wizard from the plugin.xml overview page), when you click file->new->project, other->JBoss PortletProject, you will get an error message

The selected wizard could not be started......

If you hit details you'll see that it can't find the class org.eclipse.ui.wizards.newresource.BasicNewResourceWizard - which is in the plugin org.eclipse.ui, which is on the dependency list.
However, it works in a runtime Eclipse, so if you start a new eclipse with Testing->Launch an Eclipse Application on the overview page of plugin.xml, it'll work fine and you can see what I've done so far. Maybe someone who's done more plugin work than I have (which won't be hard!) can figure out what I've missed.

It's still a bit rough - I wanted to tidy it a bit before releasing, but since this forum is up I figured it would be better to get a bit embarassed about untidy code than let someone do a bunch of work that has been done already - and as I mentioned above the "new JBoss portlet project" is still under the "other" category, not a special JBoss or Portlet category, but the functionality is there to get some basic information about your portlet application and create some skeleton code, build files and xml descriptors. I'd like to extend it so you can add a new portlet to the portlet application and it would update the descriptors accordingly, and things like for a new portlet creation you can specify some configuration parameters which would then be correctly described in the descriptors.

Hopefully it'll be a good kickstart for this project

Cheers,
KEv.

[theute]

We will need to get this sorted out (some CVS module), but for now i just put it here: http://www.jboss.com/products/jbossportal/contrib/jbpp.zip

Thank you KEv for your contribution !

[mculpepper]

Hi Kevin ..

Do you have an IM I can get a hold of you with? I'd like to discuss your plugin. You can find me at:

Y!: [e-mail]
MSN: [e-mail]
AIM: arcane advocate
Skype: marshall.culpepper

[mculpepper]

Kevin --

I took a quick look at your contribution and I have some feedback =).

First of all -- we highly appreciate your contribution. I'm hoping we can take what you've done and eventually integrate it into JBossIDE. It will take some work though =).

The main functionality of your plugin seems to be a JBossPortlet project wizard that generates skeleton XML descriptors, an ant build script, and the Java class that implements the Portlet itself. I think this is a great start. Here are some other things that I think would be really great in addition:
- Standalone Portlet wizard that edits the the corresponding descriptors automatically
- Auto-completing descriptor editors (preferably built on top of the WTP XML editor) for people with existing descriptors

Anyway, this is a great start. The code is very unpolished but this is a non-issue for an initial contribution IMO. The important thing is that you have a working prototype, we can talk about formalizing the contribution at a later time. I look forward to talking to you more -- maybe we can setup a Webex where you can demo this functionality to the rest of the Portal and IDE team members, would you be interested in something like that?