I’m receiving quite a few e-mails asking questions about features, plug-ins, update sites and extension.xml files and how they relate so I thought I would try and clarify things.
Term | Description |
Plug-in | The smallest unit of code you use to create functionality for an Eclipse based client. This is where the actual Java code is. |
Feature | Used to package and bundle plug-ins together. Features are thin wrappers for plug-ins and is basically a single file called feature.xml. You can bundle multiple plug-ins into a single feature. When installing code into Notes you actually install the features which in turn point to the plug-ins to copy to the client. You can only manage features through the Notes “code UI” (File/Application/Application Management) though you can install code into the platform by simply copying the plug-ins into the appropriate directories in the file system. This is not recommended… 🙂 |
Update site |
Update sites are used to deploy features to clients. An update site is simply a directory containing a
When an Eclipse based client contacts an update site it reads and parses the site.xml file to discover what’s available there. |
extension.xml |
These files are used when installing code using the MyWidgets sidebar plug-in and is a shorthand for manually installing code. There is no magic at work here. When you drop an extension.xml file onto the sidebar panel the following steps are performed:
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