Platonos - Platonos Projects - The Platonos Plugin Engine - Platonos PluginEngine Tutorials

Tutorials will show you simle examples of starting the plugin engine, how to indicate where to find plugins, providing application wide attributes that plugins can use, building plugins and all the details involved. Each tutorial will go into more detail as you progress through them. Below you'll find each tutorial and a brief description of what it covers. Click on the tutorial title to view the tutorial.

Tutorial 1 - Starting the Plugin Engine
This tutorial will introduce you to using the API to instantiate the engine and how to specify locations to find plugins at.

Tutorial 2 - Building a simple plugin
Your first plugin will wet your appetite for how easy it is to develop plugins. This tutorial will start off the explanation of the plugin configuration file, the directory structure of a plugin and the differences between a single file plugin archive and the expanded directory plugin format.

Tutorial 3 - Extension Points
This tutorial will explain in detail what Extension Points are, how and why they are used, and describe their role with the plugin framework.

Tutorial 4 - Extensions
Extensions, the complimentary component to extension points, is explained in detail as well, why and how they are used, their role within the plugin framework and more. Extension points and extensions provide the bulk of the means for plugins to be useful. There are other ways, as you'll see in later tutorials.

Tutorial 5 - Events
Plugins can acknowledge events they may fire, allowing other plugins to listen for them at runtime. This tutorial will explain how events within the plugin engine framework differ from those you may be familiar with, such as AWT/SWT/Swing events, and how they are similar.

Tutorial 6 - Listeners
Listeners are notified when events are fired, in this case when events registered by plugins that listeners are resolved to listen for. Tutorial 6 will explain how listeners work within the plugin engine framework, and how they tie the event system together.

Tutorial 7 - Dependencies
Plugins can depend on other plugins, make use of their classes and any embeded libraries. This tutorial will explain how it works, the rules to follow, pitfalls to watch out for and more.

Tutorial 8 - Token replacement
Plugin config files are made up of a lot of string values. Because of the way extension points allow for extensions to provide dynamic xml that at runtime is used in any number of ways, not the least of which is to display text on the screen, it may be necessary to allow for localization of strings. It may also be that a value is not known at the time the plugin is developed, but could be provided at deploy time in a dynamic deployment situation. Other scenarios may arise as well. Regardless, the plugin configuration file can contain tokens that when loaded, are replaced with resource bundle property values OR application context string values. This tutorial will go in to detail as to why they are needed and how to use them.