eGroupWare Setup

Miles Lott

A developer introduction to using the next generation setup application for egroupware.


Introduction

Welcome

Thanks for taking the time to look over this document. If you are a developer who is new to egroupware, this document will be invaluable to your success during the life of your application. This is in addition to the other fine documentation available in the phpgwapi/doc directory in your install. Even long-time phpgw developers should benefit this document. Herein, I will attempt to outline the critical steps required in order to get along with setup3, setup-TNG, or whatever we end up calling it (Hey, how about 'setup'?)

Overview

With setup3, we introduce several new capabilities and technologies for the developer and end user alike. Michael Dean was kind enough to offer up schema_proc to form the core of an abstracted and database-independent upgrade process. This enables developers to write a single set of upgrades and table definitions, which should then work on MySQL and PostgreSQL, or any other database type we might add in the future.

Adding to this to control the process was a good chunk of the old setup program, written by Dan Kuykendall (Seek3r). Dan had everything to do with the new dependencies support and with the format of the $setup_info array in setup3.

Setup3 adds multi-language support for the setup application, a long missed feature, I would imagine.

Setup3 gives each application developer control over their application install and upgrade processes, while giving them access to work within a realm formerly owned by only the former core egroupware applications. Yes, this is extra work for the developer. But it is hoped that setup3 is also viewed as a tool that can truly enhance the development process.

OK. Let's dive right in...