The Plugin System

I have now created seven weblog entries describing the process by which I arrived at a Plugin System for Charlie. All plugins can provide Modules and Filters, so they can participate in all stages of processing an HTTP request. All plugins adhere to a convention, so they all work in a similar way. And all plugins are hidden from all other plugins, as they all talk only to Charlie and its Manager proxies. The PluginManager and the PluginFactory work together to find, load, and install the plugins. While I have not mentioned it earlier, the PluginManager is told when to load the plugins by the WebApplication class, which is a part of the runtime Web System.

The whole Plugin system works, and frankly I am bored of writing about it (yes, yes, you’re bored of reading about it too). In my next weblog entry, I’ll talk a little more about the runtime Web System.