Hi cub.uanic,

Welcome to the Monastery. I will introduce you to one of the Monastery's functionalities that will be of great help for you in the future: the Super search. If you do a Super search for the word “plugin”in the title, you will find some very good references such as:

• Plugin Functionality?
• How do plugins work?
• Plugin-type architecture
• Plugin Programming

Please, let us know if you have another question

Cheers,

I like to use Module::Find. It's a little slow, but if your process is long-running (like a daemon or mod_perl app) it's sufficient. It lets you easily load all modules under a given namespace. Then you can add plugins just by dropping a new module in the right spot.

You still have to do some work to use the plugins, of course. Either your client code needs to keep track of the modules loaded, or needs to call some initialization method in them, or the modules need to register themselves with the client code when they're loaded.

I suspect you can get most of what you want with require and perlboot. If that isn't helpful, please tell me how a plugin differs from a perl package and I will refine my answer.

UPDATE: some (untested) code as requested:

for my $potential (<plugin_dir/*.pm>) {
    eval qq( require "$potential" );
    if( $@ ) {
        warn "plugin failed to load: $potential";
    }
    else {
        if( $potential =~ m|plugin_dir/(.+?)\.pm| ) {
          my $c = $1;
          if( eval { $c->can("expected_method1") and $c->can("somethin
+g_else") } ) {
            push @loaded_plugins, $c;

          } else {
            warn "$potential failed to load correctly";
        }
    }
}
[download]

Although, rather than rolling your own — which I barely started above, you'd be better off looking into some of the posts below. Of particular interest is "Re: How to make plugins."

Really, I have some ideas in my head.
But I don't want to reinvent the wheel, and so - give me please more details, if you can (ideally - with some code or prototype)


--
cub.uanic

Disclaimer: I wrote it and did a presentation on it at YAPC last year.

I refer you to the Wikipedia entry on plugin. Plugins and extensions are about adding optional functionality to an application.

I'm interesting in different techniques: based on directory structure or modules/objects hierarchy, auto-loaded and load on demand etc - all that can have sense.

The concept behind a plugin is that the core application will still work if the plugin has not been installed. What you are talking about is code that has been installed on the target machine, but not loaded into the Perl interpreter. This is provided in the core module autouse, or you can roll your own with AUTOLOAD subs and/or run time require.

Plugin architectures on the other hand, can and have been done in Perl many times. The concept is relatively painless, owing to the dynamic nature of the language. A CPAN search for plugin shows a variety of modules that use this concept. I draw your attention in particular to Module::Pluggable, and my own Module::Optional as generic tools for plugins in the sense defined in the wikipedia article.