[seam-dev] Re: Seam and modules

[Christian Bauer]

On May 29, 2008, at 18:20 , Gavin King wrote:

> we have talked about something like this, and have prototyped a
> plugin architecture in Seam Wiki.

Which is now beta-complete. However, it's not very exciting, here is  
what it can currently do:

- Supports packaging of classes, i18n.properties, themed xhtml+css, in  
a single plugin package (org.myplugin.*) and serving the stuff from  
the classpath

- Supports installing some metadata from an XML descriptor

- Supports text macros that allow you to include plugin fragments in  
wiki pages, with a very dynamic settings/preferences system

So, the only interesting thing to generalize here for Seam would be  
the first feature.

It can't do any of the really important things, like installing/ 
reloading plugin JARs at runtime. The metadata model is also very very  
specific to how the wiki software is operating. At this point I don't  
think we should continue with the module/plugin system - why provide a  
module/plugin API if you can't manage them. I will possibly make some  
additions to integrate it better with the search engine of the wiki  
and then call it a day for Seam 2.x. I do NOT want to start hacking  
with classloaders.

This is something we can attack again with Seam3 and a better core/ 
deployment engine - see WebBeans RI discussions.