Debug environments for the Eclipse Amlen protocol plug-in SDK

You can debug the protocol plug-in that you are developing in two ways. You can choose to run the protocol plug-in server in Eclipse, or you can run the plug-in server and the plug-in on your Eclipse Amlen server.

By using the plug-in process classes in the imaPlugin.jar that is included in the SDK bundle, you can debug your protocol plug-in. This JAR file enables two methods of debugging protocol plug-ins: Running the protocol plug-in server in Eclipse, or running the plug-in server and the plug-in on your Eclipse Amlen server.

If you run the protocol plug-in server in Eclipse, you can run the protocol plug-in server process remotely and use the Eclipse Amlen server to forward messages to the external plug-in server process. This approach is intended for use during the early stages of development. With this approach, you can deploy a plug-in .zip file that contains only a plugin.json descriptor file and no JAR files. Then, you can debug and update your plug-in classes in your local development environment without redeploying a plug-in .zip file on the server.

After the first phase of development is finished, you must test your production protocol plug-in by installing it and running it on your Eclipse Amlen server. If you encounter unexpected problems while you run in that environment, you can use the second debugging approach to connect to the plug-in server that runs on the server. When you debug during this phase, you must create a new plug-in. zip file and reinstall it on the Eclipse Amlen server each time that you make updates to your plug-in classes.