Prior to gvSIG version 2, the main way of developing with gvSIG was to create a workspace with the official distribution's source, so that making a plugin required all the information necessary to compile the full gvSIG distribution. Although some efforts were made to build plugins without the need for a full gvSIG workspace, it was not up until version 2 that this mechanism functioned properly. The recommendation now is not to insert plugins into a workspace with gvSIG sources.

In version 2, the correct way of developing a new plugin is with a binary installation of gvSIG by creating a workspace containing only our projects, and then deploying our binaries with that installation.

In addition to this, considerable effort has been made in version 2 to make the libraries that use the gvSIG plugin mechanism independent. This allows us to perform much of the development without having to bind to gvSIG, or to compile to test it. We can create small applications that use the libraries of gvSIG and can be run independently.

Complementing this, ​​the necessary changes have been made so you do not have modify the code for common operations you might need during development.

If you have already developed for gvSIG 1 you should bear in mind this change in the way of working. Do not create a workspace with the gvSIG sources and compile them if it is not necessary. This only needs to be done if you need to make changes to the sources.

Usually the gvSIG source code does not need to be modified as you can develop your own plugin functionality rather than modifying the gvSIG code. If you need to do this, and these modifications might be useful for other users, then you can submit them as patches for inclusion in future versions of gvSIG.