Use the "blank" Control sample (located at <BeehiveRoot>/samples/controls-blank) as a template for building your own Control projects.

The template contains a basic 'Hello World' control to get you started. Control projects can be archived in a JAR file and then imported into multiple applications. Simply import the JAR archive into the application's WEB-INF/lib directory.

The following instruction assume that you have completed the basic Beehive set up procedure at Set Up the Dev Environment.

To use the template:

(1) Copy the contents of <BeehiveRoot>/samples/controls-blank into your project folder (referred to as <Project-Folder> below). (Or copy controls-blank to another location and rename it as <Project-Folder>.)

(2) In the file controls-blank/build.properties, edit the beehive.home property so it points to <BeehiveRoot> (the top-level folder of your beehive installation). For example, if your beehive installation resides at /apache/apache-beehive-1.0, then your build.properties file would appear as follows.

build.properties

An Ant build file is included in the template, which will compile your control project into a distributable JAR file. After you have copied the contents of controls-blank into your project folder, the following directory structure should exist:

The following Ant command will compile the control template.

This will produce a distributable JAR file at: <Project-Folder>/build/mycontrols.jar.

To use the JAR in your other projects (like a web project or a web service project), copy mycontrols.jar into the project's WEB-INF/lib directory.

(To change the name of the generated JAR file, edit the following line in build.xml.)