Developing Abilities

This section describes the writing of an Ability.

First, we will take a look at the boilerplate, which is common to all Abilities.

Then, we will look at the way to insert your code into this boilerplate, and how to take advantage of the predefined builtin parameter types.

We will also cover how to handle external library imports with regards to PacketWeaver built-in mechanism to detect missing requirements.

Then, we will cover the topic of nested Abilities, and how to send parameters and get results from an Ability.

Finally, we will study how to start parallel Abilities, how they communicate, and how to interact with them.

• Basic ability writing
  • Complete the meta-data
  • The howto method
  • Adding parameters to your Ability
  • Text output
• Advanced Ability Writing
  • Using another Ability
  • On the use of third-party libraries
• Flow-based Programming and Ability writing
  • Doing it all by hand
  • Reading and writing from an Ability
  • Writing
  • Using the Pipe Syntactic Sugar
  • Multiple Inputs and Outputs
  • On Detecting Source and Sink Conditions
  • Transfering Pipes