Developing Plugins
Workspace plugins are able to be developed on any of its supported platforms and a set of detailed developer tutorials are provided inside the application’s help system. Before getting started, make sure you have met the platform specific requirements listed below.
Note that as of Workspace 4.0, we only provide 64-bit Workspace binaries meaning any Workspace plugins or applications you build will also have to be 64-bit. If you need to deploy your Workspace plugin or application to a 32-bit environment, please contact our team.
Windows
To develop your own plugin on Windows you will need Visual Studio 2015 or 2017 installed on your machine. The Community editions are sufficient for doing this.
Be aware that:
- The Community edition has some commercial restrictions
You can obtain the latest version of Visual Studio from Microsoft’s servers:
You will also need to install a copy of CMake. When developing your project, it is recommended you launch CMake from the Workspace developer menu.
Mac
To develop your own plugin on OSX you will need the latest version of XCode installed on your machine, as well as the XCode command-line tools. You can access both of these from the apple developer downloads page (XCode itself can be installed through the app store). When considering which compiler to use, keep in mind that Workspace itself is built against the Clang compiler, and uses libstdc++ as its standard library.
You will also need to install a copy of CMake. When developing your project, it is recommended you launch CMake from the Workspace developer menu.
Linux
Linux plugin developers will need to have installed a suitable C++ compiler, such as GCC, which you will need to install via the package manager on your Linux distribution. Workspace itself is built with GCC under Linux.
You will also need to install a copy of CMake. When developing your project, it is recommended you launch CMake from the Workspace developer menu.
Qt5 requires the libgl-dev package (libgl1-mesa-dev under Ubuntu) to be installed. If this is missing the CMake configure step will complain about failure to find Qt5Gui_GL_Library.
If you will be using the Workspace to create release packages, you will also need to ensure the rpmbuild command is available (it is not currently possible to create packages on Debian systems without the use of the alien command line tool). The package that provides the rpmbuild tool may have different names in different Linux distributions, so you may need to search a bit to find the right package.