How can I deploy a custom GeoTools datastore to GeoServer?

Question

I'm using GeoTools v8.0 and GeoServer v2.1.3. I've currently built a working datastore connecting to a PostGIS database based off of the GeotTools' abstract datastore tutorial. After days of on and off research, I cannot seem to find a way to deploy a datastore jar file to GeoServer.

I've expected that dropping a jar file in GeoServer 2.1.3\webapps\geoserver\WEB-INF\lib and cycling the server will allow it to discover and publish the availability of the datastore. I cannot find evidence of this happening in the logs and I definitely don't see evidence of it in the UI.

Ultimately, I would like to have a datastore that I can use complex SQL queries with (as opposed to just CQL) and write back geometry objects to my database via WFS-T as an option for selection in the GeoServer UI. Right now I'm interfacing with my database using views which doesn't allow me to save to the tables the views are referencing.

Has anyone done this before or is anyone aware of an example out there of how to do this? This is largely unfamiliar territory for me and any bit of help or direction is immensely appreciated.

Answer 1

It's been a while since I did this (look for the excel datastore in unmaintained to see my code) - I seem to remember that the key trick is to makesure you have a

META-INF/services/org.geotools.data.DataStoreFactorySpi 

in your jar.