Well, there are many ways you can go with this, so I will give you some ideas that you can combine to meet your own needs.

It is probably a good idea to design an interface that all of your plugins must implement. That way, when you do discover what plugins are installed, you can instantiate and work with them.

You will probably identify a plugin directory. You can easily get a list of .pm files in the directory:

my @plugins = <plugins/*.pm>;

[download]

or even use File::Find to recursivly search.

When you have a file you can work with it as such:

for (@plugins) {
   require $_;  # Basically "use"-ing the file
   s/\//::/g;   # Convert the path name into a package name
   s/\.pm$//;
   push @pluginInstances, $_->new; # Create a new instance
}

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So, using file listing features, require (or do or eval), you can list and load your plugins. How you track your plugins within the app and how your plugins integrate will be entirely up to your needs.

Ted Young

($$<<$$=>$$<=>$$<=$$>>$$) always returns 1. :-)

In reply to Re: Plugin-type architecture by TedYoung
in thread Plugin-type architecture by thor

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