Pepper module developers

This guide aims to help you to develop your own Pepper module.

The easiest way to start developing a module is along an example, therefore the following tutorial provides the easy generation of a Pepper module's skeleton. The skeleton contains dummy implementations for an importer, a manipulator and an exporter.

• Tutorial: Getting started in 10 minutes
• Tutorial: Develop with Eclipse

After setting up the skeleton for your own module it might be helpful to take a closer look into the architecture of a Pepper module project and how does the data- and communication flow work between Pepper and it's modules. If you do not have the time to read all the following articles, just pick the ones you are interested in. But we recommend to read them all in the given order to get a comprehensive overview.

• Pepper module's architecture
• Module initialization
• Analyzing corpus format (only importers)
• Im- and exporting corpus structure (only im- and exporters)
• Map documents and corpora
• Monitoring the progress
• Clean up
• Customizing the mapping

A helper to extract tags and attributes from an xml file is described here. This tool can help you improve the implementation speed when creating an importer for a xml format.

• Pepper module developers helper

For testing, Pepper uses the JUnit framework (http://junit.org) and provides a test environment which makes it rather easy to test your module without setting up the Pepper platform.

• Testing

Pepper provides a mechanism to check whether your module runs on the Pepper platform and fulfills a set of features which should be implemented. The mechanism is called fitness check and is similar to an integration test.

• Fitness Check

In oder to use third-party dependencies, and activate them for use during the development and debugging process, read

• Using third-party dependencies

When you are done with the implementation work of your module you should deliver it in a way which Pepper can easily plug in into the platform. Therefore Pepper provides a Maven assembly goal to do so.

• Bundle and deliver

Last but not least, when you have done all the great work to implement a module for Pepper, let the world benefit from your work. Publish your module that people can use it. But don't forget to think about licensing. Since Pepper is an open-source software, we plead to think about open-source too. Pepper is under the Apache 2.0 license, which does not force you to go open-source, but there are a lot of good reasons to go open source, see https://opensource.org.

You are convinced of open-source? Then don't forget to publish your sources on a portal like github (https://github.com/), source forge (https://sourceforge.net/), bitbucket (https://bitbucket.org/) and so on.

If you would be so kind to let us know about your great module, we will publish it on Pepper's homepage (http://corpus-tools.org/pepper/knownModules.html) and can include it into the official Pepper releases if you want.