SolarNode Development Guide

This guide explains how to setup a development environment for contributing or modifying the SolarNode application code.

The SolarNode project consists of a set of OSGi bundle projects that, when combined and run in an OSGi container, form a complete SolarNode application. Each OSGi bundle comes configured as an Eclipse IDE plug-in project (Eclipse refers to OSGi bundles as "plug-ins" and its OSGi development tools are collectively known as PDE). Although Eclipse is not actually required, the remainder of this guide will describe setting up Eclipse for viewing and running the code for development purposes.

Eclipse Setup

If you haven't already set up your SolarNetwork development environment, go through the Eclipse Setup Guide first, and then return here.

Clone Git repositories

The SolarNode project is contained in the solarnetwork-node repository. You can clone a Git repository by going to Window > Open Perspective > Git Repository Exploring (you may need to choose Other... under Open Perspective if Git does not appear there).

1. [email protected]:SolarNetwork/solarnetwork-node.git

Note this is in addition to the common repositories mentioned in the Eclipse Setup Guide, which also describes in more detail how to clone repositories in Eclipse.

Plug-in project naming conventions

The SolarNode code is divided into many small plug-in projects which follow a Java package-like naming convention using periods between domain names, like net.solarnetwork.node.datum. All SolarNode-specific projects start with net.solarnetwork.node followed by a feature name and then optionally followed by other implementation specific names. Examples of features are:

• control - plug-ins for controlling devices
• datum - plug-ins for collecting data from devices
• hw - plug-ins for hardware-specific support
• io - plug-ins for communication protocol implementations
• setup - plug-ins for managing SolarNode itself

If you are not interested in a particular feature, you can streamline your Eclipse workspace by closing the projects you don't need (right-click and choose Close Project).

Runtime configuration

Import the /solarnetwork-build/solarnetwork-osgi-target/defs/launch-confs/SolarNetwork-node.launch launch configuration via File > Import > Run/Debug > Launch Configurations. After you import this, go to Run > Debug configurations… and you should see a SolarNetwork-node configuration.

Disabling test bundles

Most SolarNetwork bundles have an associated unit test fragment bundle whose name ends with .test. For example the net.solarnetwork.common.web bundle has an associated net.solarnetwork.common.web.test unit test bundle. These unit test bundles can really slow down the launching of the SolarNetwork platform in Eclipse, so it is a good idea to disable them so they are not included at runtime.

You can disable test bundles on the Bundles tab of the launch configuration. Type test in the filter field to easily show only the test bundles, and then you can disable each of them, like this:

Unit test logging

For unit tests, a different log configuration from the platform runtime is used. In the net.solarnetwork.node.test project, copy the environment/example/*.properties files into environment/local. You can then edit the ones in local as needed, as they are ignored by Git.

Running or debugging the SolarNode application

See the Debugging SolarNetwork with Eclipse page for information on running SolarNetwork applications within Eclipse. You don't need to run the SolarNet application if you include the net.solarnetwork.node.setup.developer and net.solarnetwork.node.upload.mock bundles in your launch configuration and omit the other net.solarnetwork.node.setup.upload.* bundles. Once you launch the platform, SolarNode will be available at http://localhost:8080:

When using the net.solarnetwork.node.setup.developer bundle, the login credentials are

Username	Password
-11	solar

After logging in, you should see all available configurable bundles show up on the Settings tab: