[Webtest] Re: Canoo WebTest R_1104 Build Fixed

[Paul King]

[Mostly for developers]

I have started playing around with a 'plugins' directory structure.
So far I have just moved the pdfsteps into a 'plugins/pdftest' folder
and its necessary jars into 'lib/plugins/pdftest'.

At the moment, the classpath.xml just includes 'lib/plugins/**/*.jar'
(as does the build file) so there is no immediate obvious difference.

The build does generate (strict and relaxed versions of)
webtest_base.taskdef and webtest_<pluginname>.taskdef (for each
directory in the plugins directory) as well as the current
webtest.taskdef which includes all of the steps. Currently this
is just for the pdf steps but we could move in applets, verifySchema,
propertyTable (if we wanted) etc.

Things which this could allow in the future (with more!! work):

(1) compile plugin steps with base and <pluginname> jars (but not
    jars for all the other plugins)

(2) provide plugin steps with their own classloader so that different
    plugins could have different versions of 3rd party jars (probably
    quite a lot of work)

(3) change classpath.xml and taskdef.xml to be aware of plugins
    (e.g. so I could import taskdef_base and taskdef_applets but
    not taskdef_pdftest if I wasn't interested in testing PDFs)
    [this is just hyperthetical - applets is currently part of base]

(4) we could turn each plugin into an antlib so we could use namespaces
    if we wanted to, so we could have both <wt:clickLink...> and
    <pdf:clickLink...> if we chose without a name clash.

Let me know what you think. If there are serious objections I can back
it out. My reason for wanting to go this way is that I have a customer
who might want some extensions done and this structure will make it
easier for me to add them in.

Cheers, Paul.