I’ve just released a bit of source code that has been a consistent struggle of mine. I love scriptable applications. Applications with an Applescript scripting dictionary win immediate points in my book. I also really love applications that provide multiple ways to write plugins. But let’s face it, very few applications actually let you write your own features using Python, Ruby, or Nu.
I’ve been working on integrating this in my own applications in bits and pieces for years. Over the weekend, I decided to slap together the various incantations that I’ve had in several projects into one unified interface. With it, it should be really easy for developers to provide support for many, many scripting languages. At least, I’m hoping it can.
I’m calling my project “PluginManager” and I’ve released code to support Python, Nu, Javascript, Applescript, Cocoa plugin bundles, Lua, and Ruby. I plan to add support for F-Script and will look into the possibility of also using Perl in the near future. This release is for programmers who want drop-in efficiency for loading scripts as plugins in their applications. I’ll be working on it much more in the near future.
2 comments on “Source: PluginManager”
Chris Hanson:
February 3rd, 2009 at 6:51 pm
Not to nitpick, but the Apple Publications Style Guide term is “plug-in,” capitalized in prose as “Plug-in” with a lowercase “i,” and inter-capped in code & directories as “PlugIn” with a capital “i” (because it’s a separate word).
You can see this in, for example, the name of and path returned by the method -[NSBundle builtInPlugInsPath].
Grayson:
February 3rd, 2009 at 7:28 pm
Thanks. I don’t consider it a nit but rather something I ought to have done. When I tossed PluginManager together, it was basically a loose collection of a bunch of stuff I’d done in other projects centered around a half-brained design pattern. I wasn’t careful with a lot of things that I’ll be correcting in the next week or two so there’s probably a bunch of things like this. I’ll make this change soon. Thanks again for pointing it out.
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