Re: [Bodington-developers] Plugin interface

[Jon M. <jo...@te...>]

Alistair,

Basically your plugin is a servlet. You could implement it as a subclass 
of HttpServlet, deploy it by referencing the class in the web app 
config. file and access it from the Bodington template as a servlet 
include. You could even update the class and the standard Tomcat class 
loader will reload and instantiate the new version. If there is 
something about the templates that stops the call to "include" that 
could be easily fixed and should be fixed because calling installed 
servlets is a very obvious thing that people will want to do.

In the future people might want runtime installable modules that really 
interact with Bodington and that would require a more involved solution.

This is my recommendation as an unpaid consultant - if you don't like it 
pay me to give you the answer you want ;-)

Jon


Alistair Young wrote:

>> Instantiation of the Plugin
>
> at the moment, one instance per template with shared functionality in  
> that instance. It's in it's infancy just now so that's likely to change.
>
>> Initialisation
>
> at first instantiation
>
>> Calls out from plugin
>
> uses some bod methods to get current user


>
>> Calls into the plugin
>> Does your plugin have multiple functionality?
>
> no
>
>> Does it use parameters to its method calls?
>
> no
>
> It's functionality is implied by it's interface contract - it's an  
> HTMLPlugin so that's all it does, outputs HTML. Facility just calls  
> it's run() method.
>
> It connects to a database to get the info to generate the HTML.
>
> Alistair
>
> On 23 Mar 2006, at 12:11, Jon Maber wrote:
>