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This document describes the OpenAlea framework from the developer's point of view, describing how to make OpenAlea package easily available to the community.
Developing your package in the openalea framework present a number of benefits. It allows
OpenAlea provides some tools to facilitate package creation and to share code.
Read the build and install framework document.
To know current and future developments, just have a look to the Proposal pages (PEP). Feel free to report a bug or suggest new features on public OpenAlea gforge.
For a better understanding of historical and technical choices, it is possible to browse minutes of weekly meetings, Coding sprint and modeling sprints.
You can also develop your own package as described in next section.
A package is an autonomous piece of software.
OpenAlea packages use different programs and libraries. You must install and setup your development environment before being able to develop your own package.
If you have to use Subversion, have a look to How to use SVN.
When developing or porting your package, you must keep in mind that what you write must be be easily understandable and reusable by others developers. This is a basis of the OpenAlea project.
The coding guidelines contains some advice to write better code that can be read by other developers.
You must also provide :
Your package can be :
The document how to create an OpenAlea package is a tutorial to help developers to implement their packages.
If you want to start directly with a real example, download the starter package.
If your package is based on a C++ library (for efficiency reasons), you can read How to integrate cpp code in python.
Because OpenAlea goal is to share knowledge and software development, an OpenAlea package must be released under an open source license.
For more informations, read the license guidelines.
Releasing a package for OpenAlea doesn't mean that the authors loose their rights on the package. The authors remain the owners of the copyright and then they can decide how they want to distribute their packages.
The OpenAlea website can provide the visibility for your package. We encourage to create a page for each available package. Moreover, it is possible (but not mandatory) to distribute your package on the gforge platform.
The gforge repository can be used as a download server.