• CommitPolicy

Guide for CartoWeb 3 Development

This page is meant to be useful for existing and new developers wanting to extend and contribute to cartoweb3. It gives general rules and pointers to documentation.

• Coding style: See the Coding style section in the CartoWeb documentation

• Consistency: please be consistant with the existing style (naming) and policy. See NamingPolicy for recommended/required names.

• See CartowebCvs how to setup your project in CVS

• The existing infrastructure matches your needs:

  • Use the concept of project to customize the aspect of cartoweb: ProjectHandling

    • Most of the work of the visual customisation and configuration can be done using the concept of projects.
• You need new functionalities not present in cartoweb:
  • Be really sure the existing plugins can not fit your needs. Just ask what you want on the mailing list, and with luck a developer will tell you that it is already possible to do it in the base system.
  • Do not reinvent the wheel: try to extend an existing plugin which does already part of what you are trying to achieve.
    • If the base plugin does not expose a point of extension for derivated plugins to use:
      • Ask the developers about you need, and the proposition of modification you need to make to the base system. As an example, you would need that an existing plugin includes a protected method which can be overriden by subclasses, to let them do specific work. The base plugin would then have a "do nothing" method for this purpose.
  • Write a proposal in the wiki, with the explanation of the requirements, the proposed design and implementation
  • Develop your new plugin.

    • If the framework would benefit from your plugin -> See next point.

You want to make changes to the framework:

• This might be the case when:
  • you added new functionalities
    • to improve the main framework
    • to add extensibility to the framework for your new plugin
  • you added a new plugin
  Follow the following points:
• Announce the changes you are about to commit to the list.
• Be sure you respected the coding style and philosophy of the framework.
• Add the new features (if visible) to the "test" mapfile. All features should be visible by default.
• Add unit test for the new plugins and features. There are plenty examples in the tests directory how to do it.
• Be sure all tests are passed ok.

Before Commit:

Before committing a new functionnality, a new plugin or an improvement which implies several changes in framework, you have to submit it to other Cartoweb developpers.

• Create a patch using 'cvs diff'. You MUST use the unified diff format and use 8 lines of context. You can achieve this by putting this line to your ~/.cvsrc:

diff -u8

• Send the patch to cartoweb-dev@lists.maptools.org

• Wait for remarks
• Make changes if needed
• Commit

• Announce commit to cartoweb-dev@lists.maptools.org