Plug-in mechanism implemented in Perl

romanlazarev has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Dear All,

I'm in the process of writing a code for a web-site. The idea is that it has to be modular in its features. By saying that I mean, that there is a storage of data and I wish to run a report against this data, all I have to do is copy a script and hook it up to the main code like a plug-in (think of it like adding a plug-in in a Photoshop). The question that I'm trying to answer is - how to implement this "plug-in mechanism" in perl? What about performance (when some snippet of code has to be ran via "shell" of "exec" every time a variable is passed)?

Thank you in advance!
Roman

Comment on Plug-in mechanism implemented in Perl

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Re: Plug-in mechanism implemented in Perl by tomhukins (Curate) on Jul 06, 2001 at 18:10 UTC
You might find Plugin based Perl app, architecture for module API and plugins and inheritance useful. In addition try using Super Search to look for plugin or plug-in - you'll find a few more nodes where writing plug-in based systems in Perl has been discussed.	[reply]
Re: Re: Plug-in mechanism implemented in Perl by romanlazarev (Initiate) on Jul 06, 2001 at 19:57 UTC
Thank you, Tom. You were very helpful!	[reply]
Re: Plug-in mechanism implemented in Perl by suaveant (Parson) on Jul 06, 2001 at 18:35 UTC
Really, this is a major part of Object Oriented programming, I don't have any links off-hand, but OO is great for this. You come up with an interface and write different modules with different back end code, but with the exact same methods, and then you can seamlessly interchange them... Damian Conway has an OO Perl book that is supposed to be good look at perltoot to start - Ant	[reply]