Support for automatic install of non-core plugins

[Jari Häkkinen]

It would be nice to get an automatic install/update of non-core plugins from an official site like ​http://baseplugins.thep.lu.se. Somekind of user interface is needed and then also support in the core to perform the steps usually done during installation/upgrade of a plug-in.

[Nicklas Nordborg]

A first step in this direction would be to make it easier to register plug-ins with BASE once they are installed on the server. For example, in base.config we add a 'plugin.dir' setting which points to a directory where all plug-ins MUST be installed. BASE can then scan this directory for JAR files containing plug-ins. To know which JAR file that does have plug-ins we need to make the plug-in developers include a file with information about this. In the simplest form it would just list the class names of the plug-in classes. For future enhancements it is probably a good idea to make this XML based. It could for example also include information about en URL to download upgrades of the plug-in.

After scanning the directory BASE displays a list with new plug-ins and the admin can select those that should be installed.

[Martin Svensson]

(In [3698]) References #364 Automatic install non-core plugins. First check-in, still alot of things to be done.

[Martin Svensson]

(In [3700]) References #364 The main functions in core is now done for this. A test class is also created and added to the other tests. Support to import/install configurations at the same time as installing the plugins is not done yet.

[Martin Svensson]

(In [3704]) References #364 Moved the PluginInfo? class to another package, added a class to handle information about configurations for each plugin info object. And some smaller adjustments.

[Martin Svensson]

(In [3706]) References #364 Started updating the GUI to support auto installation of plugins

[Martin Svensson]

(In [3708]) References #364 Configuring the installation is allmost done.

[Martin Svensson]

(In [3712]) References #364. Most of the plugin settings can be saved now, but still some things left to add

[Martin Svensson]

(In [3714]) References #364.

[Martin Svensson]

(In [3733]) References #364 The functionallity is more or less done. The internal class in PluginInfo? to read jars needs to be refactored and moved to class JarClassLoader?, also some testing and documentation before this can be closed.

[Martin Svensson]

(In [3753]) References #364, documentation

[Martin Svensson]

(In [3755]) References #364, documentation

[Martin Svensson]

(In [3759]) References #364, documentation

[Martin Svensson]

(In [3760]) Fixes #364, Uses the existing JarClassLoader?, when reading/loading jar-files instead of an internal class

[Martin Svensson]

(In [3763]) References #364, Added instructions how to make ant put base-plugins.xml and base-configurations.xml in the plugin jar-file when building an external plugin. Also updated the examples about this.

[Martin Svensson]

(In [3765]) References #364, Correct inconsistent variable/property 'plugin.dir' becomes 'plugins.dir'

[Nicklas Nordborg]

(In [3832]) References #364.

• Test program now looks for the test plug-ins: JarPlugin? and NullPlugin?
• Changed FileUtil?.findFiles to use a regular expression filter instead
• Example plug-ins are included in 'ant dist'

[Nicklas Nordborg]

(In [3866]) References #364: Support for automatic install of non-core plugins

Fixed some issues in the documentation.