RE: Plugin interface desing?
RE: Plugin interface desing?
- Subject: RE: Plugin interface desing?
- From: Jesse Grosjean <email@hidden>
- Date: Fri, 4 Aug 2006 13:56:03 -0400
I've read about how to make plugins, and I've written a demo app that
finds and calls a method on the plugin. That much I have. However,
what I can't seem to locate out there is a good document about how to
design a plugin interface for various problems. That is, if I want
to hand processing off to a plugin, or have it extend the GUI in one
place, etc. as to what concepts could be employed in the protocol to
make that easiest.
It's theory, and not proper for a discussion here, but if anyone has
some links or resources to follow up with, I'd love to see it.
Please take a look at my Blocks plugin framework.
http://www.hogbaysoftware.com/project/blocks
It's an open source framework for building "pure" plugin architecture
applications, and I'd love to have other people building off if it.
Currently all of my applications are built on Blocks, and some people
have written Blocks plugins to extend my apps, but so far no one else
has written any Blocks based applications. If anyone is interested
I'd be happy to get people started.
Blocks is a little different than standard plugin architectures,
because it's goal is to allow all application functionality to be
provided by plugin. Your main application become a boot loader for
the plugin framework, and all other functionality is provided by
plugins. It's similar (but much smaller and in objective-c) to the
Eclipse project plugin framework. To be able to do this effectively
plugins must be able to plug into other plugins. Basically each
plugin must define the points that it "extends" and may optionally
define points that other plugins can extends. Then the framework puts
the application together at runtime.
Blocks has two parts. First there is the core framework (~7 classes
with no dependencies) for loading plugins. And then there is a set of
common plugins that will be useful for many apps. For example there
are plugins for software update functionality, crash reporter,
preference pane, shareware license...
Anyway take a look, I'd love to get some other application developers
interested in this project.
Jesse
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