Generic Plugin Engine (Java) / News: Recent posts

Hey all, we have started a new project, The Platonos Project, which like Apache and other projects, contains a number of child projects within it. One of these is our generic plugin engine, renamed to Platonos Plugin Engine. An application framework, components and plugin building tools are also there. Please check out the new project site at www.platonos.org. Thank you.

The Generic Plugin Engine is nearing completion, slowly but surely. It's been a long road to get to this point, lots of changes in design, testing, and more. We appreciate the feedback and help from the many who have over the past couple years.

This release is more of a "getting ready to release" test run. I wanted to make sure of the process being the first time releasing something on sourceforge. The majority of the engine is done, the design is not going to change before release, just finishing up work on the rest of the capabilities, writing docc/tutorials, etc before a final release. There will be a few milestone releases before the 1.0 final is released.

The engine is coming along and is near MileStone 1 completion. Extesion points are added, Extensions resolve against Extension Points. The embeded class finding routines for .par plugin files is working and Evert is continuing to tweak and optimize that code to make .par plugin loading faster and more stable.

On another front, a soon to be added sub-project of this engine, named "appshell" for now, is starting to pan out. It is a generic Swing application UI shell with the plugin engine at the heart. More to follow soon on its workings.

Evert has been working feverishly to not only complete the embeded library loader routines, but optimize it to make it faster. The embeded loader code allows a single .par plugin file to be deployed with embeded .jar/.zip files, resources, and plugin classes, all accessible to the plugin classloader without ever having to unzip the .par file to disk. Evert has been running various performance tests to see how long it takes to load different sized plugins, how many per second, etc. We'll post more results with hardware/software specifics as the engine nears milestone 1 completion.

The source code can now be obtained via cvs. At this point (April 20th, 2003), the code is not compilable, but is accessible.

A completely rewritten generic engine will be available soon for download and use. At present it functions but has yet to provide any documentation and samples. Once we get examples of its use, detailed information and such, one or more packaged files will be put up for download. Currently the CVS source is not yet available. That will come a bit later.

Hey all,

We are readying the source for CVS, almost there. Another week or so and we will have it in there. CVS access is limited to developers signed up for this project. When we add the source we will explain the rules of developing this engine.

We have added forums for discussion on the various topics related to the development of the plugin engine. Feel free to join in discussion and perhaps the development team.