I learned it the hard way (no documentation on this) and now you can profit:
- the vCO SDK you can download
* is outdated (as of today and in contrast to the latest vRO release)
* is not a hard requirement for plug-in development as all you really need are the libs which are - as already mentioned - outdated
* makes initial development harder due to unnecessary complexity and the - outdated - eclipse integration
- best way to start is the Maven archetype already mentioned
- the archetypes use a combination of various technologies which add complexity, e.g.:
* by default Maven AND Ant are used for the build process, even though you could do it all with Maven only
* there is no identical build management setup for the different archetypes which may also confuse
* pom setup is not ideal and need tuneing
* spring (new sdk) and non-spring (old sdk) parts are mixed in the archetype examples and cause confusion
I'd suggest to start with the basic spring-achetype and work your way up. All you really need are the latest libs which you can get from your vCOs maven repo (as mentioned above) and some Java IDE. Due to it's native spring integration I like to use the spring.io STS.
The libs from VMware (exist on your vRO appliance) you'll need are:
- o11n-provided-deps.jar (compile time only)
- o11n-sdkapi.jar (compile time only)
- o11n-spring-tools.jar (compile time and runtime - dunno why this lib is not yet shared in vRO, would make public vCO plugin releases so much easier due to all the legal stuff involved)
There are still some parts of the SDK I don't fully understand yet (e.g. async calls gave me a hard time) but you can learn from my experience by browsing my coopto repo on github. It's not much but the best you'll find out there as of today when it comes to vCO SDK.
