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Hi,

I have been programming in Perl for long and at number of places I come
across modules which say they follow a plugin framework and anyone can
plug their plugins (codes) into their software.

Can anyone give me pointers as to how to develop such a software which
supports plugin framework . I mean can I read articles or tutorials about
it somewhere?

Thanks,
Vikas.

In article < lo.EDU>,
Vikas <> wrote:

> I have been programming in Perl for long and at number of places I come
> across modules which say they follow a plugin framework and anyone can
> plug their plugins (codes) into their software.
>
> Can anyone give me pointers as to how to develop such a software which
> supports plugin framework . I mean can I read articles or tutorials about
> it somewhere?

I don't know of any good tutorials etc on the subject but here's what
general info I've learnt about such plugin architectures from building
and using them:

* plugins are loaded on demand
* plugins are generally best modelled as classes, so you load the plugin
class and instantiate a plugin object of that class
* plugins conform to a specified API. Some methods may be mandatory,
some may be optional, and so on, but there must be some standard to work
with
* the API can be as simple or as complex as you need. One class of
plugins I wrote has one constructor method (returns a new object), and
one object method (returns 1 or 0)
* Inheritance can be very useful. E.g. an X::Y factory class produces
X::Y::Foo and X::Y::Bar (etc..) objects, and those objects inherit some
methods from X::Y, maybe things such as debugging routines, file I/O,
and so on.

If you've got any more details about the kind of plugins and application
you want to write there's probably some more specific pointers.

P

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