Launching plugins from command line
Launching plugins from command line
- Subject: Launching plugins from command line
- From: Rick Hoge <email@hidden>
- Date: Fri, 16 Apr 2004 16:43:24 -0400
Dear group,
I'm trying to rewrite a plugin class I've been using to perform image
processing operations interactively on datasets in a document-based
app. I need to change it so the same module can be run cleanly in two
ways: 1) interactively from within the document-based application and
2) on the command line. I realize AppleScript would be quite natural,
but in the short term I need to be able to run these from Unix shell
scripts to fit into our workflow (will probably try to support
AppleScript too).
My initial implementation of the plugin class (actual processing
modules are subclasses of the plugin base class) runs interactively,
but will need some significant revision to be run from the
command-line. It seems like if one is disciplined about using
key-value coding (in the first version I wasn't), then this should be
possible. For command-line invocation I'm considering writing a
"plugin-launcher" executable that would basically take the name of an
arbitrary plugin and a list of key-value pairs on the command line.
The shell invocation might look something like
runPlugin spatialFilter -kernal Gaussian -fwhm 3.0 -inputFile
myfile.foo -outputFile myoutput.foo
An alternate solution might be to provide an entry point in the plugin
base class which allows command-line invocation and automatic setting
of instance variables using command-line flags. Not sure whether this
is feasible in a loadable bundle though - yet another option could be
to subclass plugin base class to provide the command-line
functionality.
The other part of my plan is that interactive invocations should be
able to save an XML representation of the plugin settings as metadata
in the output files or directly to disk so that a user can
interactively configure the plugin and then save the settings to run
from the command line.
I am wondering if there is any precedent for writing plugin objects
that can be configured and run from the command line in this way, or
any suggestions or gotcha's that come to mind.
Thanks for any suggestions,
Rick
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