Creating Plug-Ins

Overview

This section describes how to create plug-ins for Silk Central. Only the tasks that are common to all plug-in types are discussed here.

Plug-In Species

Silk Central provides several plug-in APIs. Each API is considered a species.

Compilation

For developing and compiling plug-ins, see Silk Central Release Notes for the appropriate Java version. This is important for compatibility with the Silk Central Java runtime environment. Silk Central is using the AdoptOpenJDK.

Deployment

After you create your plug-in classes and implement a species API, you can create a plug-in package (a JAR or ZIP file).

If your plug-in has no further dependencies (or depends on libraries that are already part of Silk Central), simply create a JAR file that contains your classes.
If your plug-in depends on additional libraries, put the libraries into the subdirectory lib and pack all of the libraries together into a ZIP archive.

Place the created file into the plug-ins directory located at <application server installation directory>\plugins\.

Note: You must restart the application server and the front-end server to make the newly deployed plug-in available in Silk Central. For more information about restarting servers, see the Administration topics in this Help.

Distribution

As the plug-in species types are known by Silk Central, it is also known which servers (execution, application, and front-end) require which species. Each plug-in can be installed on the application server. Silk Central automatically distributes the correct plug-ins to each server.