[opencms-dev] Modules development: how to getting started?

[Alan Kelon Oliveira de Moraes]

Hello!

I'm new to OpenCms and I would like to have some input from the
experts regarding to modules development outside the OpenCms
editor/workplace.

My team will start to develop a couple of modules to OpenCms, some of
them will perform periodically some batch operations like reading some
xml files and formating the contents to a nice graphs to managers.
Since we're geographically distributed, we're used to rely on control
version systems (Subversion in our case), so it's indispensable to
everyone to develop the tasks from their locations, update the
repository and build our systems.

I researched (Google and the mailing list) for some days looking for
the environment used by OpenCMS developers to develop new modules. I
couldn't understand exactly what the best practices are, but I noted
the following:

- Use the synchronize feature to use an external editor and edit the
files you need under /system/modules/your.module.here and
/sites/default/something
- I'll put my classes (or jars) at
$TOMCAT_HOME/webapps/opencms/WEB-INF/lib to make them available to
OpenCms

But:

- When synchronizing something at /sites/default/, I get a bunch of
xml files, not the so nicely editable as in editor;
- We can easily mess up the /system/modules contents because, at the
synchronization time, the OpenCms just use last updated files and
turns them the actual files on OpenCms.

I'm wondering how to build modules from the source - as done with
org.opencms.welcome or org.opencms.frontend.templateone - and __an
easy way to update the modules without to re-deploy the whole OpenCms
system__. I also noticed the tomcat.update ant task, but I can't
figure out how to use it properly too.

Is there any "modules getting started guide" that I missed to read? I
hope I was clear enough with my doubts.... Could anybody explain me
the build process; the manifest.xml structure and its creation; and
how to build a module from scratch?

Thanks for your patience and I'm sorry for my bad English and if I was
not as polite as I should be. Oh, sorry for the long, long, long
e-mail too =(

Best regards,
--
Alan Kelon Oliveira de Moraes - http://kelon.org
M.Sc. Candidate in Computer Science
Federal University of Pernambuco - Brazil
--
Alan Kelon Oliveira de Moraes - http://kelon.org
M.Sc. Candidate in Computer Science
Federal University of Pernambuco - Brazil