Weaverbird: A real example of plugin management
https://reddit.com/link/1thyw7d/video/iiu22gsdh52h1/player
Recently, we introduced Weaverbird - a framework for working with dynamic plugins. In this post, we want to show a real example of how it can be used. The GUI is build on top of TabShell.
The main idea is that a plugin configuration is represented as an XML file. When the application is distributed, it already contains predefined plugin configurations (at the same time, users can add their own plugins). A configuration contains module definitions, repositories used to download them, plugin metadata, and other related information.
Using a plugin consists of two steps:
- Install - download all required modules from repositories.
- Activate - create a ModuleLayer containing the plugin modules and start module activators.
Weaverbird uses the JPMS as its module system - the native Java modularity solution that provides stroing plugin isolation, package access control, dependency integrity and related capabilities. That's why plugins remain isolated, predictable, and safe to load dynamically.
