Movian

h1. Getting Started

To develop a plugin for Showtime it's easiest to load the plugin via Showtime's plugin development argument (-p):

Example:

<pre>

build.linux/showtime -p testplugin

</pre>

This will output something like:

<pre>

plugins [ERROR]: Unable to load development plugin: testplugin

                 Unable to load testplugin/plugin.json -- File not found

</pre>

Go ahead and create the directory:

<pre>

mkdir testplugin

</pre>

Edit the JSON file with your favorite text editor:

<pre>

emacs testplugin/plugin.json

</pre>

And put the required fields in there:

<pre><code class="javascript">

{

  "type": "javascript",

  "file": "testplugin.js",

  "id": "testplugin"

}

</code></pre>

You can reload the development plugin at any time by pressing Shift+F5 in Showtime (assuming you have not mapped that key/action to something else in the keymapper setup). This works fine even if the plugin failed to load for whatever reason. All hooks and resources that are registered by the plugin is automatically removed when the plugin is reloaded.  The same procedure happens when a plugin is uninstalled from the plugin repository browser.  Pressing Shift+F5 will also reload the data model for the current loaded page. Ir. If you have a page opened that links to your plugin in development mode Showtime will first reload the plugin and then reload the page itself. This makes it very easy to do rapid development of plugins.

Now go ahead and edit the javascript file

<pre>

emacs testplugin/testplugin.js

</pre>

Put one single line in that file:

<pre><code class="javascript">

showtime.print('hello world');

</code></pre>

Press Shift+F5 and the console window from where you started showtime

should say:

<pre>

hello world

plugins [INFO]: Reloaded dev plugin testplugin/

</pre>

Showtime will just execute the plugin which only outputs 'Hello world' on the console and then exits. So, how to create something more interesting?  First the javascript code needs to create a scope where its local variables will live and also need to remember 'this' which is, when the script is invoked, a plugin object created by Showtime. Change the code to:

<pre><code class="javascript">

(function(plugin) {

  showtime.print("Hello! I'm a plugin running inside Showtime " + showtime.currentVersionString);

})(this);

</code></pre>

h2. Routing an URI to the plugin

Almost everything in Showtime has an URI. This is also one of the way for a user to interact with plugins.  Each plugin reserves URI space starting with the plugin's ID. This is not imposed by any code in Showtime but rather a convention. URI routes registered by plugins take precedence over the URI routes that Showtime itself handle so it is possible to, for example, add routes for certain well known domains on the Internet (think http://www.youtube.com/ .. )

Back to our test code:

<pre><code class="javascript">

(function(plugin) {

  // Enable URI routing for this plugin.

  plugin.config.URIRouting = true;

  // Add a URI route and a corresponding function to be invoked

  plugin.addURI("testplugin:hello", function(page) {

    showtime.print("I was called");

  })

})(this);

</code></pre>

Now, reload the plugin (Shift+F5) and type "testplugin:hello" in the search input field on Showtime's home page. (Maybe you didn't know, but the search field can be used to open any valid Showtime URI). Showtime will open a new page with nothing but a spinning throbber and just print the console message. Not very exciting but it's a good start.