[Nitro] ratchets, parts and plugins

[Fabian Buch]

Am 20.11.2006 um 16:04 schrieb transfire at gmail.com:
> Are there any conditions in which this would not be enough to handle
> plugins for nitro? If so, it should be easy enough to build a wrapper
> around this basic functionality. But I would like to know what they
> would be, b/c maybe there are some general improvements that can be to
> this plugin system.

Parts are indeed a little bit different to usual plugins. They are  
not like usual libraries.

Imagine the following usecase: a Blogsystem (like flare) could be  
implemented as Part. Integrating it into several other of my nitro  
apps (for example extending Oxyliquit with a Blog), could be done via  
requiring this part into these apps.
Now some of these apps might need a little bit customized blog system  
and would use this blog part just as basis, build up on it, change it  
and customize it. That's easily done, if you copy the Part to the  
app. Not so with a library that's used by all of the apps in the same  
way (except configurations and such).

Additionally imagine I share this Part and release new versions over  
time. People will have integrated it into their apps and customized  
it to their needs, maybe in a way that makes it incompatible with  
newer versions released by me. Maybe some users like to stick to  
their customized one for some apps, but use a new version for newer  
apps (again likely to customize it).

In these cases copying is the preferable way.

Additionally take into account that Parts can include stylesheets,  
images and similar that have to be in a folder accessable by the  
webserver (in Nitro public/).

These two things are what "gen part" handles via copying at the  
moment. If your ratchets could to this (how exactly could that be  
"wrapped around this basic functionality"?) it'd be great to replace  
gen.

External helpers (discussed a month ago or so, then called  
"components") are more like pure libraries and probably would fit  
perfectly into your ratchets plugin grid.

Fabian



-- 
Nitro Q&A: http://oxyliquit.de/
Blog: http://blog.fabian-buch.de