CIShell Hack-a-thon

This is an experiment from the ​JSMF Workshop on Plug-and-Play Macroscopes, Nov 16-17 at Indiana University. The idea is to convert a Rappture-based tool into a ​CIShell plug-in. Run it as follows:

1) Follow the ​CIShell "hello, world" example and create a new, empty plug-in for the desired tool in Eclipse.

2) Run the rp2ci script attached to this page to convert your Rappture tool.xml file to the files within the new project:

% rp2ci mytool/tool.xml ~/cishell-workspace/NewProjectForMyTool

The empty project that you just created will be updated in place with information from the Rappture tool.

3) Use Eclipse to export the updated plug-in to CIShell.

4) Run CIShell and invoke the plug-in. It should prompt you for the input parameters needed by the Rappture tool.

To Do

• Right now, the script only prompts for inputs. It should run the tool and extract outputs, but that isn't done yet.
• It would be great if the script created the plug-in, updated it, and exported it all in one shot--instead of using Eclipse. Someone said that theere's a bnd tool that can create an OSGi bundle from a jar file.
• Not sure how to map complex data types (e.g., Rappture molecule) to simple Java data types. ​Apache Thrift, maybe?