September 2007
Creating a Delphi Plug-in Framework – Tim Jarvis (Code Gear)
Tim discussed ways of creating a plug-in framework in Delphi.Win32 and Delphi.NET, highlighting differences and similarities. A common need in modern applications is to be able to add functionality without re-deploying the entire application, in other words plugging in new functionality. Delphi itself allows developers to “plug-in” to the IDE. In this session we explored a commonly used pattern to achieve this aim using Delphi.Win32. We also looked at the slightly different mechanism for doing the same thing in Delphi.NET, the non-deterministic nature of the .Net framework means that we need to use a “pull” mechanism rather than a “push” one. Tim touched on topics such as Factory Patterns, Interfaces, Class Methods, Attributes and Reflection.