Plugin-Based Systems with Self-Organized Hierarchical Presentation.
Boto Bako, Andreas Borchert, Norbert Heidenbluth, Johannes Mayer · 2006
Abstract — Plugin-based applications can be dynamically extended at runtime. This leads to highly extensible systems on the one hand, but structuring the representation of plugins is difficult on the other hand. Often plugins are represented in graphical user interfaces (e. g. in menu structures) which are generated at runtime. But the kernel does not have—and may not have— any knowledge of the participating plugins. Therefore, the kernel can not care about the plugins ’ order. This may lead to menu structures with varying order each time the application is run. Obviously, this results in less intuitive and ergonomical graphical user interfaces. Self-organizing mechanisms producing a linear structure of plugins have been successfully applied to pluginbased applications in previous work. But with an increasing number of plugins involved, linearly ordered structures will soon become crowded. Therefore, in the present paper the selforganizing mechanisms are extended to enable hierarchically ordered plugins and presented in a pattern. The hierarchical order can be embedded in GUI tree structures, which lead to ergonomic and intuitive self-organizing menu structures. A sample application of the presented pattern in the context of Internet portals is described.