Plunderer's Plot: Developer and Set-Up Guide

Author: Robert Moore Last updated: March 28, 2014

Development Environment

Plunderer's Plot is a Google Web Toolkit (GWT) application and so requires both a Java Development Kit (JDK) and the GWT Development Toolkit (GDT). I recommend you use Oracle Java 7, the latest GWT available, and the Eclipse IDE for Java EE developers.

• Oracle Java 7 http://java.oracle.com
• Eclipse IDE http://eclipse.org/
• Google Web Toolkit http://www.gwtproject.org/

You may need to cherry-pick the versions you use so that everything is compatible, but the important part is Google Web Toolkit.

Deployment Environment

Plunderer's plot is a web-based application that also relies on the unsupported "Owl Platform REST Interface" that was written for internal demo applications (like this one!). Furthermore, you will need an HTTP server to store static files (like images, icons, etc.). Finally, since the author is a lazy developer, he relies on Apache Maven to do a lot of heavy lifting regarding project build/deploy, especially the REST interface.

• Apache HTTPD https://httpd.apache.org/
• Old Owl Platform REST Interface https://github.com/romoore/old-owl-rest
• Apache Maven http://maven.apache.org/

Building the Project

Here's the hardest part, and I'll try to highlight the important steps:

• Launch Eclipse and install the Apache Maven and GWT integration components. This requires you to have previously installed Maven and GWT somewhere.
• Import this project into Eclipse as an Existing Maven Project.
• Once the project is imported, open the WorldModelInterface class and adjust the QUERY_HOST, QUERY_PORT, and QUERY_PATH values to match your environment. These should reflect the URL of the Owl Platform REST Interface service.
• Select the "project folder" for the Plunderer's Plot project in the Package Explorer view and then click the GDT Pull-down menu (a blue sphere with 'g') and click the GWT Compile Project option. Set the log level to something appropriate (Warn for production, Debug or Trace for development), configure the Output style, and click Compile. When prompted, make sure the "war" directory of the project is chosen for the output.
• GWT Compile will take a long time (perhaps several minutes), and will usually go from 0% to 100% without any intermediate steps.
• When completed, add 'index.html', 'Plunder.css', and the 'plunder' directory to a zip/tgz archive and copy this archive to the server.
• You should uncompress the archive inside a subdirectory in the HTTP server's "public" directory, so something like "/var/www/map". This will create the "/var/www/map/index.html", "/var/www/map/Plunder.css", and "/var/www/map/plunder/" files and directory.
• Adjust the file/directory permissions and ownership to be correct for your installation.
• Try to load up the page in a browser. Be sure to specify the correct Region name in the text box, or as a parameter to the URL. For example: http://example.org/map/index.html?q=myregion