Historically
we have seen the success of plug-in based products like Mozilla Firefox and
Eclipse IDE where new content can be plugged-in at runtime to augment software
functionality. In plug-in based
architecture there is always a base container implementation where other
components are added as plug-ins to extend its functionality; however, in these
solutions there are no extension points exposed in added plug-in components to
interact or bind them together. In this article I discuss the details of a
pattern that is a hybrid of plug-in and event-driven architecture to integrate
individual plug-ins together to come up with a Plug-in Integrator Pattern. This pattern leverages the benefits of both of these well-known
architectures to provide an optimal solution to build enterprise-ready rapid
application development infrastructure, preferably in Flex but it could also be implemented in other programming languages such as Java and C#. I call it a
pattern, not a framework, because it’s abstract and may be implemented in any
software solutions.
The
basic need to come up with such a pattern is to integrate already-released
software components at runtime and use them to develop new applications with
minimal testing and developmental effort and maximize the code reuse. Flex is already becoming the preferred choice while programming RIAs and with the
adoption of Flex in the marketplace, many web applications are being
written in Flex. It's time to think about how to provide a common platform
where these disparate components written by various vendors can be integrated
to build new applications during runtime. A good example is desktop
widgets being developed by several vendors; if coded according to this
pattern, these disparate widgets can interact with each other to provide more
elegant solutions for the end user. This pattern makes a runtime plug-in such as
embedding Flex content and hooking them up with messaging a reality, where
each Flex component can interoperate with each other to make really extensible
solutions with a versatile mix of plug-in and loosely coupled event-driven
architecture.
I you really want to take your Flex applications to the next step and expose them
to the world and also build robust Flex-based applications using
components already released by others, read on…
Why the Plug-in
Integrator Pattern? The Plug-in
Integrator Pattern is a hybrid of the plug-in pattern and event-driven
architecture. This
plug-in pattern refers to a mechanism for creating an object instance of a
certain interface at runtime while the actual configuration and implementation
of the instance is usually controlled by external configuration. The message-driven architecture refers to the design and implementation of applications and
systems that transmit events among loosely coupled software components and
services. The Plug-in Integrator Pattern is a mix of both of these concepts
where the container implements a plug-in mechanism to load contained components, implementing
the plug-in interface and hooking up these components to pass messages between
themselves by reading configuration details from an externally maintained
configurator. This mechanism of having the external configurator load and
hook up content provides the best solution to reusing existing tested components
to come up with functional applications in no time. Please refer to Figure 1
for more details.
About Indroniel Deb Roy Indroniel Deb Roy works as an UI architect for Packeteer Inc. Previously he contributed to the development of Oracle XML Publisher as development manager and participated actively in developing Novell's exteNd XML integration server. He has a passion for innovation and works with various XML and J2EE technologies.
About Alex Nhu Alex Nhu works as a manager, UI Development at Packeteer Inc. He has more than 11 years of work experience designing and architecting complex server-side J2EE and XML applications. He loves developing Web applications with Flex now after getting a taste of developing UI using other RIA platforms.
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