• Can I change this behaviour easily with another plugin? You want to be able to edit a menu item for instance.
• Do I want to be able to change this with another plugin? You don’t want a plugin to edit a menu item if it is meant to only be a simple format interpreter.

Basicly there are 2 big groups of plugin based applications, the static and dynamic. Where the static plugins are the easiest to program and most commonly used. An example would be a plugin which would load and save an image from and to a ‘.jpg’. These plugins usualy contain one function (gateway) which exposes a few plugins which usualy expose a static interface.

On the other side there are the over-dynamic plugins, which rather should be called ‘modules’. These applications would use a high level slow ‘message’ system where basicly everything is able to be intercepted, hooked up to, responded to…

Deciding what and how you want base behaviour to be able to be extended, edited or removed by plugins is the hardest part of developing a plugin based application. If everything should be able to be changed you get stuck with complicated code, and a lot of overhead due to extra ‘hookable’ calls. If almost nothing is overridable you problably get stuck with worthless plugins.

While developing a plugin extendable application it is very helpfull to put the base code in several plugins themselves, which prevents a lot of mistakes.

I’ve found python and c# to be very capable languages to write plugins, although C# is a bit more trouble than Python, Python allows you to do too much and just call functions without knowing for sure with what object you are handling.

I’ve been working on a modular server (see the modular server article I’ve posted), programmed in C#.

The base of the server is nothing more than a framework for loading / unloading libraries & plugins, managing configuration files, and hosting ’server’ plugin instances. Every server plugin itself can load plugins (like for instance a custom authentication handler for a HTTP server). I’ve noticed that having a very dynamic configuration storage is very usefull for every instance of a plugin requires its own configurations and usualy its own plugins to be loaded. I’m currently using multiple tree based files which are merged at runtime, which I’ll replace with a concept format called XTL about which I’ll tell more lateron.