Re: Cross platform, multilanguage plugins

Given your description, I'd opt for stand-alone external executables and a well-defined command-line interface.

One such standard is CGI. I've never heard of it being used by anything other than a web server, but there's no reason it couldn't be. And it's very well supported in all languages.

Another possibility is SOAP. I haven't heard of it being used in this way (fork a process and talk SOAP to it over the pipes), but again, there's no reason it couldn't be done, and the SOAP spec explicitly says any communication medium is fair game.

Depending on how you define, the above could be found to be too resource intensive.

If your application is Apache based, then an obvious avenue is to use Apache modules, such as mod_perl, mod_php, mod_python, etc.

A word spoken in Mind will reach its own level, in the objective world, by its own weight

Comment on Re: Cross platform, multilanguage plugins

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Re^2: Cross platform, multilanguage plugins by TGI (Parson) on Feb 14, 2007 at 18:40 UTC
Unfortunately, my app is not apache based. More research on my part shows that Inkscape seems to use small executables for its extensions. The question of whether this approach will be "too resource intensive" is rather open. The only way to tell is to try some tests. A big benefit on the resources side is that this approach protects me from memory leaks caused by badly written plugins. Thanks for your comments. TGI says moo	[reply]

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Re^2: Cross platform, multilanguage plugins
by TGI (Parson) on Feb 14, 2007 at 18:40 UTC

Unfortunately, my app is not apache based.

More research on my part shows that Inkscape seems to use small executables for its extensions.

The question of whether this approach will be "too resource intensive" is rather open. The only way to tell is to try some tests. A big benefit on the resources side is that this approach protects me from memory leaks caused by badly written plugins.

Thanks for your comments.

TGI says moo

[reply]