To work with our project need a gvSIG 2.0 installed. You must also install the Development project wizard addon, available through the addons manager (Tools > Addons manager).

What is going to offer this extension?

Mainly this extension will give us the option Create plugin. Using this utility, will allow the creation of maven projects, following the project structure described above, according to the custom options you choose to work with this installation of gvSIG.

This utility can be found in the menu Tools the option Development:

After accessing Create plugin option, the extension will show a wizard. This wizard will guide you to create a template from our maven project associated with this instance of gvSIG. As the most interesting points, note that the wizard will require that you enter the name of our project, group_id (default org.gvsig) and the location to generate the plugin.

You will have also to select the template to use, being able to select between a basic project with spatial support or a project to show fortune cookies. The first one is the recommended one.

If you select the second template, in addition we need indicate the type of plugin to be developed (for details see section FortuneCookie a _ plugin gvSIG). Finally, we will tell to wizard if we want to generate the extension for gvSIG or not.

As a last step in the generation of our plugin, the tool will perform a prepare_workspace to leave our project ready. Perform maven tasks 'configure-eclipse-workspace','maven install' and 'maven eclipse:eclipse'.

Once created the project, closing gvSIG, start Eclipse and import the folder we created the project. To work with it, we import the parent project (org.gvsig.<project_name>) as all sub-modules (org.gvsig.<project_name>.lib.api, org.gvsig.<project_name>.lib.impl, org.gvsig.<project_name>.main and others according to the variant chosen).

Once the project has been imported into Eclipse, we'll just create our plugin and boot normally, using the project build.xml file, and using the mvn-install target.

Finally, once developed our plugin, use the Pack plugin option of gvSIG installation. A utility to generate binaries from our plugin and will allow us to distribute it as a separate plugin or included in an existing gvSIG installable.