Learning About Plug-In Architectures?

Pimpbot5000 queries: "I've searched high and low for a book/website/etc to get me up to speed on plugin architectures, but so far the pigeons aren't delivering. Where can a programmer go to learn about the different approaches, and their respective (dis)advantages? Most resources I've come across merely point you in the direction of creating plugins for existing projects, or quickly skip over the design phase and get straight to the 'and now you use dlopen()/dlsym() to...' part." I know quite a few plug-in architectures are language specific, but a resource that went over several schemes for each language would be a valuable thing for every coder's library.

Comments

Runtime aggregation.

[Cuthalion]

Well, assuming that you absolutely must design a plugin system, lookin into some runtime aggregation systems (COM or CORBA depending on your platform and needs). That's basically with these techologies are for. (Well there are other uses as well, no flames on this please.)

Question: How many of you have worked on a project that's designed your own damned COM-like system?