Adding genericity to a plug-in framework

Abstract

Plug-in components are a means for making feature-rich applications customizable. Combined with plug-and-play composition, end users can assemble customized applica-tions without programming. If plug-and-play composition is also dynamic, applications can be reconfigured on the fly to load only components the user needs for his current work. We have created Plux.NET, a plug-in framework that supports dynamic plug-and-play composition. The basis for plug-and-play in Plux is the composer which replaces pro-grammatic composition by automatic composition. Compo-nents just specify their requirements and provisions using metadata. The composer then assembles the components based on that metadata by matching requirements and pro-visions. When the composer needs to reuse general-purpose components in different parts of an application, the compo-nent model requires genericity. The composer depends on metadata that specify which components should be connected and for general-purpose components those meta-data need to be different on each reuse. We present an ap-proach for generic plug-ins with component templates and an implementation for Plux. The general-purpose compo-nents become templates and the templates get parameter-ized when they are composed.