Creating multi-plugin AIBench applications

One of the main focus of the AIBench framework is to enhance reusability. For achieving this, you can exploit the underlying plugin-architecture of AIBench.

In this sense, You can put your Operations, Views and Datatypes in one, two or more separated plugins, based on your own design decision. The only rules that have to be followed are:

• If there are Operations and/or Views in a plugin, this plugin must be connected to the properly extension points as it was explained before.
• If the Operations and/or Views in a plugin make use of the Datatypes located in other plugin, this plugin must depend on the plugin containing the needed Datatypes.

You have to develop one Maven project for each plugin (see Maven). For example, if your application will have two plugins (plugin1 and plugin2) and plugin2 depends on plugin1, you will need to:

1. Create an AIBench application for plugin1 using the archetype.
2. Perform mvn install in the plugin1 application.
3. Create an AIBench application for plugin2 and establish a dependency to plugin1 (see next section).

Creating a dependency between plugins

You will need to create dependencies between plugins when:

• You are developing a multi-plugin AIBench application and some plugin needs to access classes or resources from another plugin.
• You need to get access to classes and resources in another AIBench plugin, for example, if you want to use the AIBench Core and Workbench API (see AIBench API).

The connection and dependency between plugins is made through the pom.xml file and, optionally, trough the plugin.xml file.

In the pom.xml, you need to create a regular maven dependency as well as to declare the artifact id in the aibench.plugins.artifactIds property.

<project>
  ...
  <properties>
  ...
    <aibench.plugins.artifactIds>
      aibench-core,aibench-workbench,aibench-shell,aibench-pluginmanager,another-plugin
    </aibench.plugins.artifactIds>
  ...
  </properties>
  ...
  <dependencies>
    ...
    <dependency>
      <groupId>my-group-id</groupId>
      <artifactId>another-plugin</artifactId>
      <version>[version]</version>
      <scope>compile</scope>
    </dependency>
    ...
  </dependencies>
  ...
</project>

If you need to access classes or resources of one plugin from another, you will also need to add a dependency in the plugin.xml:

<plugin start="true">
  <uid>my-aibench-application</uid>
  ...
  <dependencies>

    <!-- we will use the API so we need to
    depend on Core and Workbench plugins -->
    <dependency uid="aibench.workbench"/>
    <dependency uid="aibench.core"/>

    <dependency uid="another.plugin"/>

  </dependencies>
  ...
</plugin>

Note

Why do you need to edit two files? The pom.xml makes that your application include another plugin, and the plugin.xml allows you to also use a plugin from another, that is, classes from one plugin can use classes from another plugin. Remember that plugins are isolated by default (see Plugin-based architecture).