Slashdot Mirror
On Plug-ins and Extensible Architectures
gManZboy writes "Developers who want a flexible, configurable, IDE have long preferred plug-in architectures such as Eclipse over what they might view as the bloated, monolithic alternatives. Ever wondered how it all works? Well, ACM Queue just posted an article by someone who has worked on Eclipse since its inception, Dorian Birsan. He gives a great explanation of the Eclipse architecture as well as a thorough analysis of things to watch out for when developing or working with pure plug-in architectures."
Is bloat really a problem with too many features or more to do with bad coding?
How long is it before someone has so many plugins installed they are back to square one for bloat? Any operating system runs well when you first start it up. Users run into bloat problems after they have installed weatherbug, messenger programs and all the other crap they must have.
Might I suggest a slight rewrite of the first sentence:
Developers who want a flexible, configurable, IDE have long preferred plug-in architectures such as Eclipse over what they might view as the alternatives that promote pedophilia and Satanism.
It just sounds more professional.
The whole plugin environment works a lot like cooking a large meal. Add in extra ingredients, or substituting one ingredient for another can create a whole new experience. You could even use the same 'plugins' for different 'bases' if you provided the functionality correctly... like having pork (Java) as the basis for your sauce or chicken (.Net).
But, it can be a tremendously dangerous[tt] if not done correctly, so you could almost make the analogy of baking instead of cooking. Only specific elements can be used or you could ruin the whole dish... could you relate bloated software that hardly runs with something like a ruined custard or creme brulee??
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
Most of you have probably experienced "DLL hell" at some point and will look with suspicion on something that has the potential of being a "plug-in hell."
I think we already passed the potential phase a long time ago. After a while you either give up installing the latest milestone or give up your added plugins.
I love Eclipse actually, it doesn't do everything that I want though, for example MS .NET studio allows attaching to an already running process and debug it but Eclipse does not. It maybe due to Java limitations and maybe this feature will appear sometime in the future, but maybe it is just not possible to do? I am not sure.
Now look at Hurd. Hurd is a plugin environment if I understand it correctly, but it is too low level, but I still wonder, will it be possible to use Hurd as not only OS level runtime but for high level apps?
Just a thought.
You can't handle the truth.
first key concept: late-binding.
second key concept: single-root.
summary: this article talks about a non-single-root late-binding architecture. there are, of course, other organizations: the quintessential single-root late-binding program, and the raft of non-late-binding programs.
thus ends our cs moment of the day. we now return you to your regularly scheduled inanity...
Plug-ins are implemented as the plug-ins plug-ins with plug-ins over plug-ins plug-ins plug-ins plug-ins plug-ins.
Furthermore, plug-ins plug-ins plug-ins so that plug-ins plug-ins.
Mine eyes glazeth over.
P.S. plug-ins
P.P.S I just like saying plug-ins. It's a funny word. Plug-ins. Hee!
That was meant to be funny, right? Because few things are as so monolithically all-encompassing as Eclipse.
I should reveal personal bias from the outset: I despite Eclise. Though it sits open in a window just next this one right now, I still loathe it with an utter passion.
I cannot get its editor to put tabs in realistic, predicable places. I don't want my coding environment to start looking like MS Word, underlining things as problems simply because I haven't finished typing thm yet or am concentrating on another part of the design. I had to immediately turn off most of the auto-typing features such as adding brackets or quotes, because I found it vastly distracting. There's a plug-in to search the preferences! My god, that makes it out of control.
I tried to use it at home the other day to import four existing source files and then generate a build.xml file for me. It never even worked out how to import the files with the right directory root, which given a pattern of src/org/eruvia//FileBelongingToPackage.java should have been src, not src/org/eruvia/appname.
Can't stand the thing.
Cheers,
Ian
Dreamweaver is also a great framework for plugins. While the host application still offers some functionalities, they are related with the actual implementation of the plug-in architecture. You probably don't know - but Dreamweaver is now mostly built from plugins, and those are built with HTML and JavaScript almost exclusively. The HTML editor is not a plugin, but almost everything else is, and the options are unlimited.
:). When building dynamic sites, the designer and the programmer always clashed as they have different value systems (the designer dislike programming, the programmer don't care about design). So Dreamweaver was built as a layer between the programmer and the designer - helping the programmer work with the designer by writing plugins for the IDE that the designer will use to create complex things.
Not only this plugin architecture is powerful, but it's also platform independent - you can easily configure it to generate PHP/ASP or JSP code with the same plugin implementation and different platform files. Everything is XML, and a lot of regexps are used to detect code patterns and parameters that are presented in the visual interfaces. This plugin system is so powerful, that it allowed us to build a fully functional Dreamweaver PHP support layer (they only supported ASP and JSP back then), in just several months.
If you've read the Cooper book - The Inmates are Running the Asylum you will understand easily how plugins have appeared in Dreamweaver back in the Drumbeat 2000 times - as a layer between the IDE user (Betsy - an HTML designer) and the hardcore programmer (I forgot his name, but he was a he
That's what a lot of companies are doing now with great success. <shameless plug>We're doing it - http://www.interaktonline.com - with significant results - 10000 licenses sold and 500,000 downloads for the free extensions</shameless plug>, and there are also a lot of other companies doing it (you'll find more on the Macromedia Exchange - a place where people exchange free and commercial plugins)
Dreamweaver also avoids the plugin hell using a powerful packaging technique (they came with their own package format - MXP - that knows how to do "safe changes" to the IDE - like adding menu entries, code completion features, etc). Those changes are applies using the Extension Manger - a nice piece of software that knows how to "undo" IDE changes when uninstalling an extension.
Want to learn something from a working implementation? Learn how Macromedia did it and a lot of interesting lessons will be learnt.
Alexandru
Using the Slashdot posting plugin for eclipse.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
Seems that the plugin-based architecture of eclipse hasn't helped a bit with loading times. On my athlonxp 2100 with 768mb ram, it takes about 15 seconds to load, same as netbeans.
Netbeans also has very good html/xml syntax highlighting and completion. I hope Eclipse 3.1 plays catchup on this.
Open Source Java Web Forum with LDAP authentication
I tried Eclipse a while back - the first thing I do with any programming editor is of course to load a text file and try editing it.
So I try to open a random xml file on my hard disk, and, er...wait, hang on, you can't do that. You can only load a file if it's in your project (or view or solution or whatever word it is that Eclipse uses).
I researched a bit, and found some other people ranting about this, but the official line was you should add such files to your project if you want to edit them, it's the right thing to do, blah blah blah.
Call me stupid, but that kind of language lawyer prescriptive idiocy is what I try to avoid, so I went straight back to my bloated monolithic IDE that nevertheless let me load whatever the hell file I want.
I'm downloading the latest version now to see if it will let me execute a technological marvel such as loading a file I want to edit...we'll see.
(Although the last time I tried Eclipse it took me fecking ages to get a JVM set up that would even allow it to start up - "run anywhere", indeed...)
I find it amusing that the article even calls the plug-in manager the "kernel". It seems like the research into this field is basically working on some meta-OS rather than something that will provide real extensibility to a system. All it tells me is that OSs need better interface specifications to provide what folks are looking for and so write their own meta-OS.
"There are a dozen opinions on a matter until you know the truth. Then there is only one." - CS Lewis (paraprhase)
Those of you who want to try out a fully featured IDE for .Net can try out SharpDevelop. This is GPL'ed and the project (including source code) can be found at ICSharpCode.
.Net programmer.
I had written a couple of plug-ins for #D, and it took me less that two days to understand the architecture. Parts of the application are hacks, mainly because it does not have an industry heavy weigth behind it, unlike Eclipse. The project runs on contributions.
SharpDevelop architecture includes pluggable language parsers, components, add-ins etc. I will definitely recommend this application to any
Life is just a conviction.
The developers of the GPLed C# IDE wrote some well-presented documentation that discusses in part their add-in architecture: "SODA - SharpDevelop Open Development Architecture Almost all mid to large size software projects have some sort of add-in architecture. An add-in is basically an extension to the functionality of the main application. The common way to introduce an add-in structure is to load libraries from a specific directory at runtime. (Author: Mike Krueger)"
Beta only seems to work for Google. Such a shame.
being an IBM shop we have seen many of our beloved (read:working) tools being phased out in favor of an Eclipse based solution.
So far the net result has been bloated and very slow loading applications. The minimum memory requirement is 512mb with 1gb being recommended on user groups.
After my experience with it at work I would not touch it at home. Not a single developer here uses Eclipse, they all prefer to use the older programs that are no longer supported or are being phased out.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
I just read a earlier a long string of bashes around java & Open Office and then this item about Eclipse.
...
Let me tell you this.
A furiously anti-java, C++ist, debianist friend of mine tried it and found it cool for his C++ development !
It is a living demonstration that all that religious wrath around java is a non-sens.
Compared to the usual "Java is slow, Swing stinks, it closed source for playmobile developers."
Eclipse is fast, GTK native, full open-source with a very well done plugin architecture
You even have a full GCJ port for the zealots :
http://klomp.org/mark/gij_eclipse/
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
The other day I had to write a bunch of code with similar lines. Something like
I hopped over to my *scratch* buffer and typed in a short emacs lisp function (three lines of code, if that). I evaluated it, switched back to my code buffer, and added the lines by hitting a key sequence. The above lines were reduced to M-x attr RET phone RET M-x M-p RET fax RET M-x M-p RET email RET, etc. I could've even bound the attr call to a chorded key press or two.
Total time to look up the docs and write the code to extend emacs: about a minute.
Total time spent compiling code, loading a "plugin", restarting emacs: 0.
Total time spent dealing with "you forgot the static keyword on line 12": 0.
Total time spent fixing my code after upgrading emacs: 0.
This is a feature that's been around for decades. Decades! When extending your editor is this simple, you'll do it more frequently.
I can't stress enough how important security is!
When you have a late-bound, extensible environment it is so easy to mess with it. Plugins by their very nature are supposed to be powerful, with hooks into the system at very low levels. This makes it very easy for virus writers, malware authors and spyware developers to run their code with full priviledge.
But lets forget about Spyware and Virus for a moment. Lets say you have a plugin architecture for an application that does proprietary financial calculations for loan approval. You don't want someone to come along create a plugin and change those calulations.
I think about this all the time because I have been developing plugin frameworks for the past 7 or 8 years. I really don't want to limit the functionality of the plugins because in all honesty I want the plugins to be as powerful as they can be so they change the calulations. I know it sounds like I am contradicting myself but the truth is I am not. Creating a plugin architecture is not a decision that you should take lightly.
When deciding to create a plugin system you have to be sure that you can handle the complexity and the inherent insecurity that decision brings you.
#1 point with plugin systems. Plugins are all powerful.
Robert
Bet this
I've been impressed with Kdevelop since the 3.x rewrite (Gideon).
It has a plugin architecture, is native, and even has a decent vi editor kpart via yzis.
And I believe the killer feature of Kdevelop is the ability to import autotools projects - which is basically everything in the open source world.
Eclipse (CDT/C++ plugin) doesn't have this ability yet.
The other night I imported KDElibs straight from cvs, it parsed everything out, I had my class browser with the entire kdelibs project there, changed some configure options, and built the whole thing within the IDE.