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It's been a long time coming but, it's finally here! Plugins in ISAcreator. You can now create your own code, drop it into the plugins directory in ISAcreator and it will be available to call by your users!

Creating plugins in ISAcreator is not too complex, once you get past an initial learning curve. ISAcreator has a plethora of utilities, user interface components, etc. to make it easy to create attractive user interfaces. There are also different plugin types, depending on what you want to do. These can be categorised into:

1. Menu plugins (these are accessed via a plugins menu item in the tool bar (visible when users are entering data)).
2. Search plugins (these extend on the functionality of the ontology lookup tool and provide additional search capabilities on private plugin repositories etc.)

This wiki resource will contain examples on how to implement plugins for both. If you have suggestions for other places to add plugins, please get in touch by emailing us at [email protected]! This is an evolving architecture and we don't know exactly where else people would wish to extend ISAcreators functionalities.

Menu plugins

An example of a simple plugin, courtesy of Peter Karich (http://karussell.wordpress.com/2009/09/16/plugable-swing-a-hello-world-osgi-example/) but modified slightly is available here https://github.com/ISA-tools/ISAcreatorPlugins/tree/master/SimpleMenuExample. Simply clone this repository and check out the code for it. It's very simple, but everything you'll do to create your own plugins will be based on this idea. To build the plugin, just follow these instructions:

git clone git://github.com/ISA-tools/ISAcreatorPlugins.git    
cd SimpleMenuExample
mvn clean install

This will build a jar in your target directory. Then simply copy this into a Plugin directory inside the ISAcreator working directory.

Search plugins

Todo