CoreMedia Studio provides artifacts for use with Maven. Since CoreMedia Studio builds upon Jangaroo, the Jangaroo compiler documentation explains how to use the Jangaroo tools from the command line and how to use them with Ant or Maven. This covers the conversion from MXML to ActionScript and further down to Ext JS.

A detailed description of the Jangaroo build process with Maven is given in the Jangaroo tools wiki.

In the following section, you will find a description of some of the typical use cases that appear during CoreMedia Studio development using the CoreMedia Project workspace.

All following commands assume you have opened a command shell at the CoreMedia Project root directory.

Compiling the Studio Project

To create a clean build all CoreMedia Project modules, including all Studio modules, run

mvn clean install -DskipTests

To build all Studio modules (server and client), run

mvn install -DskipTests -pl :studio-server-app,:studio-app -am

Studio Client: Base Apps and App Overlays

Instead of building all Studio modules including the REST service part, it is often sufficient to just build the client modules.

The Studio client modules are packaged into apps, where so-called base apps and app overlays are distinguished. A base app is a Sencha ExtJs app and includes the ExtJs framework, Studio core modules and generally all modules that participate in theming. Modules of a base app are included in the Sencha Cmd build of the Sencha ExtJs app and are thus statically linked into the app. An app overlay in contrast references a base app and adds further modules to this base app. These modules are not included in the Sencha Cmd build of the Sencha ExtJs app and instead can be loaded at runtime into the app. Consequently, they are dynamically linked into the app.

The CoreMedia Blueprint features one Studio base app, namely the studio-base-app module with Maven packaging type jangaroo-app. In addition, there is one app overlay, namely the studio-app module with Maven packaging type jangaroo-app-overlay. It references the studio-base-app. If something is wrong with the overall Studio app, it is typically sufficient to just recompile studio-base-app.

To build all Studio client modules, run

mvn install -DskipTests -pl :studio-app -am

Alternatively, you can build the complete Studio client workspace:

mvn install -DskipTests -f apps/studio-client

To build only the Studio client modules that are part of the base-app, run

mvn install -DskipTests -pl :studio-base-app -am

Develop Your Own App Overlay

You can easily develop your own Studio app overlay. This can then for example be dynamically added to a running Studio, either via the proxy approach described later in Section Section “Running Studio Client” or via the remote URL approach described in Section Section 3.3, “Remote Dynamic Packages Configuration”.

The following figure shows a typical setup of a workspace for developing a custom Studio app overlay.

Figure 6.1. Custom App Overlay Workspace

The Maven packaging type for the app overlay module is jangaroo-app-overlay and the module must either reference a base app module or another app overlay module which in turn must reference a base app module. In this case, our module references the app-overlay module studio-app (which in turn references studio-base-app).

This app overlay module contains two sub-modules that are just ordinary Studio client modules where each contains a StudioPlugin class to add functionality to a Studio application.

Looking at the resulting target folder, you see that both plugin modules lie under packages and there is a generated file dynamic-packages.json which lists the modules of this app overlay.

Running Studio

CoreMedia Studio consists of Studio Client, a client-side (browser) application, and Studio Server, a REST service, implemented in Java. For client-side-only development, it is recommended to only use workspace apps/studio-client and only run Studio Client locally, connecting to a Studio Server on some reference system. For full Studio development, you run Studio Server and Studio Client locally.

Running Studio Client

Unlike most CoreMedia application, Studio Client is not a Spring Boot application, so it is started differently, using the Maven goal jangaroo:run (for development purposes only). Prerequisite for this is that a complete Studio web application is already running somewhere. The jangaroo:run Maven goal starts an embedded Web server (Jetty), serves some Studio client modules from your developer workspace and proxies all other requests to the remote Studio web application.

In this development mode, resources are read from target directories of the individual Studio Client modules. When MXML and ActionScript files are recompiled from within IntelliJ IDEA, jangaroo:run automatically serves the updated compiled JavaScript files. There is no need to stop and restart the process.

Running Studio Server

In the apps/studio-server/blueprint/spring-boot/studio-server-app directory of CoreMedia Blueprint, you can start the Studio Server Spring Boot application via Maven:

mvn spring-boot:run -Dinstallation.host=<FQDN>

Configuring the Build Process

The Jangaroo compiler can be configured to check whether compiled code uses non-public API. To this end, the parameter publicApiViolations of the Jangaroo Maven plugin controls how the compiler handles usages of non-public API classes in your project code. The parameter can take the values warn to log a warning whenever such a class is used, allow to suppress such warnings, and error to stop the build with an error. The default value is warn, but you can set it to error as follows:

<plugin>
  <groupId>net.jangaroo</groupId>
  <artifactId>jangaroo-maven-plugin</artifactId>
  <configuration>
    <publicApiViolations>error</publicApiViolations>
  </configuration>
</plugin>