9th Intl. Conference on Generative Programming and Component Engineering
Original Kurzfassung:
Plug-in components are a means for making feature-rich
applications customizable. Combined with plug-and-play
composition, end users can assemble customized applications
without programming. If plug-and-play composition
is also dynamic, applications can be reconfigured on the fly
to load only components the user needs for his current
work. We have created Plux.NET, a plug-in framework that
supports dynamic plug-and-play composition. The basis for
plug-and-play in Plux is the composer which replaces programmatic
composition by automatic composition. Components
just specify their requirements and provisions using
metadata. The composer then assembles the components
based on that metadata by matching requirements and provisions.
When the composer needs to reuse general-purpose
components in different parts of an application, the component
model requires genericity. The composer depends on
metadata that specify which components should be
connected and for general-purpose components those metadata
need to be different on each reuse. We present an approach
for generic plug-ins with component templates and
an implementation for Plux. The general-purpose components
become templates and the templates get parameterized
when they are composed.