Hacker's Guide

Hacker's Guide

This page provides an overview of how to get started hacking on DeepForge. It is recommended that developers become familiar with the architecture of DeepForge before they begin hacking on it.

Background and Tools

DeepForge is built using WebGME, a framework for developing domain specific modeling languages. The following resources should be helpful in understanding WebGME (and domain specific modeling):

• WebGME White Paper
• Overview of WebGME components
• Details of the WebGME datamodel
• Source on Github

It is strongly recommended that webgme-cli is used when adding custom visualizations, plugins, etc, and can be installed with npm install -g webgme-cli. JSHint is also strongly recommended.

Getting started

First, follow the instructions in the Installation Guide to get a DeepForge Server running locally. However, rather than starting the server with

npm start

start it with

npm run start-dev

This will enable the developer mode which exposes both the datamodel and provides manual control over the visualization technique used on the active node.