If I want to add a plugin which I have designed after I have written the software ... how should I do it. Suppose I designed a word pad ... and then I designed a spell checker ... how should I add the spell checker to my word pad to get it working

Hey sani,

Have you used eclipse before? I wonder if you could leverage some of their plugin loading code. That would be awesome.

You could write your own plugin loading code rather easily. Have a plugin directory that your app will scan for plugins. Plugins can essentially be packaged java code. You can place plugins in a jar; they're easy to distribute.

Each plugin could have a very defined structure. For example if you wanted just a dumb simple single action for every plugin and have that single action listed in some plugin Menu in your wordpad app, then have every plugin define doAction(...) getActionName()... and so on. Then you can use reflection and the ClassLoader to load the classes dynamically at runtime.

You can ask me for more details if you don't find it easy to do... I do think that something like eclipse would be best if you can figure out how to get it working with your code.


Ed

Thanks for the great ideas ... I have started implementing like that ... I'll tell you if I get some difficulties.