Deploying a plug-in

During the design phase, plug-ins and fragments in your workspace are used as-is so that you can quickly test and debug. Once you reach the stage where you are satisfied with your code, you need to publish it in a form fit for delivery on the platform.   

There are two ways to publish your plug-in:

• Packaging your plug-in(s) into a feature. This lets you use the platform Install and Update Manager to deliver your feature.  You can make it available on a server and publish the URL. The platform Update Manager can be used to download and install your feature.  
• Build executable version of a plug-in. This includes building all the declared run-time libraries as JARs and building a ZIP file containing all the files required to run the plug-in. Users of your plug-in will have to manually unzip the file into the installation directory of their platform.

To build a plug-in JAR, select the plugin.xml for your plug-in and choose "Create plug-in JARs..." from the popup menu.  Ant build script will be created and a wizard will guide you through executing the script.

The remaining sections describe features and how to build them.