geWorkbench

Overview

.GEAR files are essentially zipped versions of geWorkBench visual plugins. They make it easy to distribute reasonably sized upgrades to specific parts of the application.

Creating a .GEAR file

There is an ant task that will create a .GEAR file automatically. Run ant with something like “ant –Dcomponent=alignment” which will create a .gear file from the alignment component directory. Then put the resulting alignment.gear in a directory called “gears” and the next time the program is run it’ll load the component out of that file.

Viewing loaded versions of components

The version menu item, under help will list all the loaded versions of plugins, and will indicate which ones are loading from .GEAR files, an example is below.