Hey all, I wrote a plugin engine similar to the original eclipse engine before the OSGi change a few years back. I have not delved into it much yet, still getting my bearings on Android, but I am curious if the capabilities of dynamically loading classes via a custom classloader is possible with Android such that a downloaded app could support a pluggable architecture. Honestly I don't know why this would ever be done.. with the way the Android framework works with intents, broadcasts, sharing of data between apps if need be, there doesn't seem to exist a big reason to have the ability to grab plugins to an app. The one area I thought it might be useful tho is a media player.. where it may support pluggable codecs and provide the location for codec plugin developers to push their plugins to so that the media player app could present the list of "available" codec plugins to users of the app. The primary reason would be to allow a user to get just the codecs they need and not load the app with every codec out there, thus taking up more memory when the app runs. It could also be nice if the plugins could be stored on the SD card and only the one codec needed for the media being played would be loaded at runtime off the SD card to handle the media type. There could be similar scenarios for other apps.
I would guess that if it is possible, most of my engine should work as is with possibly minor changes. I was starting to work on a JDK 1.5 version with annotated plugins so there would be no plugin.xml to configure it, just annotations. I've not yet checked to see if annotations are supported as well. Thanks.
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