General Guidelines

The following section describes the common steps required to add programming extensions to the Aware IM software system. It is assumed that the reader is familiar with the basics of programming in the Java programming language and the general steps involved in compiling Java source code and packaging jar files.

• All extensions (except scripts running on the client) have to be written in the Java programming language.
• As all extensions implement some standard Java interface exposed by Aware IM, the CLASSPATH variable used when compiling the extensions must contain a reference to the correct location of the Aware IM jar filees (awareim.jar, shared.jar, openAdaptor.jar, connection.jar). For example, the command to compile the code implementing the extension might look something like this:
  

  javac –classpath c:\AwareIM\Tomcat\lib\awareim.jar; c:\AwareIM\Tomcat\lib\shared.jar; c:\AwareIM\Tomcat\lib\connection.jar; c:\AwareIM\Tomcat\lib\openAdaptor.jar myextension.java

• The name of the Java package where the extension will reside is not mandated and is up to a programmer.
• The resulting extensions may be packaged into one or several jar files. These jar files have to be placed into the AwareIM/CustomJars directory (if this directory does not exist, create it manually)
• If running Aware IM as a Windows service modify the files AwareIM/bin/awareim.conf and AwareIM/bin/wrapper.conf to add the jar files to the list of jar files used