Creating Sage Customizations

[mike1961]

Hello - what tools do I need to create sage customizations? How do I learn more about this and how do I create the jar files for this? I have a strong programming background.

Thanks,
Mike

[GKusnick]

The sticky threads in the Studio forum would be a good place to start.

[stanger89]

To maybe point you in the right direction, there are really two (potential) pieces to a 'customization'.

First the basics, all that's required to do some sort of customization is SageTV. You just launch Studio (Customize command) and have at it. Studio allows you to do anything you want to the UI, as best evidenced by SageMC, being a completely custom UI for Sage.

Where it gets tricky is if you want to do more. Studio has the ability to call external Java code (which, if you're better than me, can call any code via JNI). For example, the DVD Profiler data import is two pieces, first is an STV import (which I used Greg's studio tools to create) which adds the menu for controlling the import. The second part is a java class (not even a jar for mine) which handles parsing the DVD Profiler XML and providing function calls that are usable from within Studio.

If you're interested, I'd say "IVL" is a good thing to look at for how STVis work with the running STV, and how java code works with Studio. I'm not saying that because it's the greatest example ever, far from it. But it's what I've learned how to hack in studio on, and in reality, it's a pretty simple example. There isn't a lot of complex STVi code, and the calls to the java class are pretty strait foreward.

[mike1961]

What I want to mainly do is addon's like what I see in customizations so I'll start with that.

Thanks
Mike