Chapter 11. Working with plugins

We’ve covered a lot of ground discussing what Griffon can do for you, but there’s a limit to what it can do alone. After all, it can’t predict what a future app will need—sometimes Griffon requires a helping hand. This is where plugins fit in.

You’ve seen plugins being put to work before. Recall from chapter 7 that Swing-XBuilder provides additional threading facilities—this builder can easily be added to your application by installing a plugin. In chapter 9 you learned about FEST and easyb, two testing frameworks that can be configured to work with any Griffon application. Using these tools is as simple as installing the appropriate Griffon plugin. And in the last chapter, you learned how platform-specific installers can be created, also via a plugin.

In this chapter, we’ll look at how plugins work and how to make one. First, let’s find out how plugins can be located, installed, and uninstalled.

11.1. Working with plugins

As with all the recurring tasks you can perform with Griffon, there are a few command targets exposed by the griffon command that are available to you when working with plugins.

In this section, we’ll briefly cover each plugin-related target.

11.1.1. Getting a list of available plugins

You may want to know which plugins are already available before you decide to create one. Chances are there’s already a plugin that does what you need.

11.2. Understanding plugin types

11.3. Creating the Tracer plugin and addon

11.4. Releasing the Tracer plugin

11.5. Summary