AwareIM is a powerful software system that allows users to configure the fully functional Internet enabled applications without involving any programming work in most cases. Thus AwareIM can be used not only by professional developers but also by business professionals and end users.
In certain cases, however, it may be necessary to add programming extensions to AwareIM in order to implement the application functionality that is otherwise very difficult or impossible to configure using the available configuration tools. This mostly applies to the calculation extensive functionality (for example, some mathematical algorithms) or interaction with a non-standard hardware that is not supported by AwareIM out-of-the-box.
It is important to stress, though, that in order to support such functionality programmers do not have to learn new technologies or understand at a very deep level the internals of the AwareIM software. All that is required is the knowledge of the Java programming language (other languages will be supported in the future) and generic understanding how the extensions fit into the AwareIM framework. In most cases programmers have to implement some standard interface that AwareIM requires in order for the new extensions to plug in naturally into the AwareIM software. The programmer’s job is, therefore, to understand what different methods of the interface mean and write the code that implements these methods.
AwareIM allows programmers to write extensions (plug-ins) in the following areas:
In addition AwareIM allows developers to use Javascript to affect the behaviour of user interface widgets on the client (browser).
This document aims to describe in detail what is involved in adding extensions to each of these areas. Before we start describing each area individually we will describe some common steps required to add the extensions to any of the above areas.