Projects/Plugin support improvements

Motivation & Requirements

There are a number of motivations behind the creation of the plugin architecture framework. Some of these include the following:

• Separates plugin interface from its implementation;
• Provides simple and clear mechanism that facilitates additions of new plugin interfaces and their implementations(modules);
• Handles both built-in and dynamic plugin modules;
• Allows multiple implementation of the same plugin interface;
• Provides uniform way to supply parameters for plugin configuration;
• Allows one plugin implementation to use services provided by the other plugin implementations.

From these items we have developed a more formal set of requirements covering the design and the implementation of the framework to support the plugins. These are as follows: