[RomaFramework-dev] Plugin-based development in ROMA?

[ted s. <emo...@ya...>]

Hi All,

I have been working on my own ROMA/Naked Objects/EMF - like 
metadata-based framework for a while.  I looked at ROMA a while back and 
didn't get it.  But ROMA has come a long way since then and I want to 
evaluate it again to see if it meets my own requirements.
So far I like a lot of what I see in ROMA, especially like the way that 
ROMA binds aspects to annotations and ROMA's concept of modules.

Anyway, the one requirement that I have, that I am not sure that ROMA 
can handle, is that I want to develop a plugin-based product.  I 
actually want to build an Eclipse RCP application (I am willing to build 
an RCP view module for ROMA, that's not a problem).
However, I want my application to be extendable by third party plugins 
in the way that the Eclipse IDE is extendable by plugins.  For instance, 
it should be possible for a third party plugin to dynamically extend the 
menu system of my ROMA-based application when the plugin is loaded into 
the application.

Let me make the question more specific and refer you to the wiki article 
on how to create a menu in ROMA, at 
http://romaframework.xwiki.com/xwiki/bin/view/Doc/Create+menus.
It is not clear to me if it would be possible to develop a menu in ROMA 
that could be extended by a dynamically loaded plugin from a third party.
The ROMA documentation states that ROMA creates a menu from a POJO, and 
by default the pojo's fields and actions are treated as menu items.

Question....  Would it be possible to extend this example to dynamically 
create a menu from an flat text file with menu labels.
That is, given a flat text file with the following three lines in it...
        menu1
        menu2
        menu3
...could I dynamically create a menu in ROMA with the three menu items; 
menu1, menu2, & menu3?

If that can be done in ROMA then I know that I could hook ROMA up to the 
Eclipse plugin-based extension mechanism.


Best Regards, and Congratulations on your recent release.  You've done a 
lot of good work on ROMA!
Ted Stockwell

PS:  I suspect that the answer to my question might involve the xml 
descriptors (maybe I could generate a descriptor dynamically at run time?) 
But I haven't been able to understand the exact relationship between 
descriptors, pojos and annotations yet.
The ROMA docs could use just a snippet of documentation regarding 
descriptors.