From: Curt Hibbs <curt@...>
Date: 2003-11-21T01:14:09+09:00
Subject: Re: Plugin-API

On Thu, Nov 20, 2003, Christian Kruse wrote:
> Hi there,
>
> I'm writing an application in Ruby which should be easy to extend. One
> should be able to write a plugin for this application and should be able
> to load it with an entry in the config file, e.g.
>
> [snip]
> What's the "ruby way" to do this?
>
> Greetings,
>  CK

You might want to look at the plugin system used by FreeRIDE which is called
FreeBASE and has been packaged as a separate download. See:

     http://freeride.rubyforge.org/wiki/wiki.pl?FreeBASE

The FreeRIDE IDE is completely (100%) implemented as a set of plugins, with
the exception of FreeBASE, which is the plugin manager. It has sophisticated
facilities for specifying dependencies between plugins (which affects the
load order of plugins) and includes a high-performance messaging engine (the
databus) that allows plugins to communicate with each other while minimizing
coupling.

However, if your plugin needs are very simple, this might be overkill.

Curt