Plug In Baby Jun 27 2006

Here’s a good post from Phil Haack about plugins, and making a plugin architecture resilient to versioning. He presents some good ideas, some stuff worth thinking about in there. I’m thinking about and working on plugins loads at the minute, including working on an add-in architecture for Project RIDE-ME. Reading this post though made me start to question some of the terminology, where a lot of the time I’m using “plugin” out of context. The way I now see it, there are plugins, add-ins, and providers. I’m about to refactor a bit of code I’ve been working on, as it is effectively a provider system, for database and logging providers, however I’ve referred to it throughout as plugins, and I feel this is now slightly out of context…

Plugin: something fairly generic, to be able to “plug in” new components to change almost any aspect of an application
Add-in: something that is contained, used more within rich user interfaces to provide a specific bit of UI content or functionality, much more refined than a general purpose plugin
Provider: some kind of general functionality such as data querying, logging, that can be achieved against different sources, hence the need for differing providers

This is now how I’m starting to formalize some of the terms above, and while almost all of the reflection code remains the same regardless, the design of the architecture depends heavily
on which of the above you are trying to achieve.


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