spring-plugin/src/docbkx/index.xml

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<book xmlns:xi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XInclude">
  <bookinfo>
    <title>Spring Plugin</title>

    <subtitle>The smallest plugin system ever</subtitle>

    <authorgroup>
      <author>
        <firstname>Oliver</firstname>

        <surname>Gierke</surname>

        <affiliation>
          <jobtitle>Senior Member Technical Staff</jobtitle>

          <orgname>SpringSource, a division of VMware</orgname>
        </affiliation>

        <email>ogierke (at) vmware.com</email>
      </author>
    </authorgroup>

    <releaseinfo>V0.8</releaseinfo>

    <pubdate>23.09.2009</pubdate>

    <copyright>
      <year>2008-2012</year>

      <holder>The original authors</holder>
    </copyright>

    <revhistory>
      <revision>
        <date>04.11.2008</date>

        <author>
          <firstname>Oliver</firstname>

          <surname>Gierke</surname>
        </author>

        <revremark>Initial draft</revremark>
      </revision>

      <revision>
        <date>05.11.2008</date>

        <author>
          <firstname>Oliver</firstname>

          <surname>Gierke</surname>
        </author>

        <revremark>Added metadata module documentation</revremark>
      </revision>

      <revision>
        <date>24.01.2009</date>

        <author>
          <firstname>Oliver</firstname>

          <surname>Gierke</surname>
        </author>

        <revremark>Added remark to inner bean usage</revremark>
      </revision>

      <revision>
        <date>23.03.2009</date>

        <author>
          <firstname>Oliver</firstname>

          <surname>Gierke</surname>
        </author>

        <revremark>Added section on plugin ordering</revremark>
      </revision>

      <revision>
        <date>21.02.2012</date>

        <author>
          <firstname>Oliver</firstname>

          <surname>Gierke</surname>
        </author>

        <revremark>Move project to SpringSource</revremark>
      </revision>
    </revhistory>
  </bookinfo>

  <preface>
    <title>Preface</title>

    <section>
      <title>Introduction</title>

      <para>Building extensible architectures nowadays is a core principle to
      create maintainable applications. This is why fully fledged plugin
      environments like <glossterm><abbrev>OSGi</abbrev></glossterm> are so
      poular these days. Unfortunately the introduction of
      <glossterm><abbrev>OSGi</abbrev></glossterm> introduces a lot of
      complexity to projects.</para>

      <para>Spring Plugin provides a more pragmatic approach to plugin
      development by providing the core flexibility of having plugin
      implementations extending a core system's functionality but of course
      not delivering core <abbrev>OSGi</abbrev> features like dynamic class
      loading or runtime installation and deployment of plugins. Although
      Spring Plugin thus is not nearly as powerful as <abbrev>OSGi</abbrev>,
      it servers poor man's requirements to build a modular extensible
      application.</para>
    </section>

    <section id="preface.context">
      <title>Context</title>

      <para><itemizedlist spacing="compact">
          <listitem>
            <para>You want to build an extensible architecture minimizing
            overhead as much as possible</para>
          </listitem>

          <listitem>
            <para>You cannot use OSGi as fully fledged plugin architecture for
            whatever reasons</para>
          </listitem>

          <listitem>
            <para>You want to express extensibility by providing dedicated
            plugin interfaces</para>
          </listitem>

          <listitem>
            <para>You want to extend the core system by simply providing an
            implementation of the plugin interface bundled in a JAR file and
            available in the classpath.</para>
          </listitem>

          <listitem>
            <para>(You use Spring in your application)</para>
          </listitem>
        </itemizedlist></para>

      <para>The last point actually is not essential although Spring Plugin
      gains a lot of momentum in collaborative use with Spring.</para>
    </section>

    <section>
      <title>Technologies</title>

      <simplesect>
        <title>Spring</title>

        <para>Spring is the defacto standard application framework for Java
        applications. Its consistent programming model, easy configuration and
        wide support for all kinds of third party libraries makes it the first
        class citizen of application frameworks. Spring Plugin tightly
        integrates into Spring's component model and extends the core
        container with some custom functionality.</para>
      </simplesect>
    </section>
  </preface>

  <xi:include href="../../core/src/doc/core.xml">
  	<xi:fallback href="../../core/src/doc/core.xml" /> 
  </xi:include>

  <xi:include href="../../metadata/src/doc/metadata.xml">
  	<xi:fallback href="../../metadata/src/doc/metadata.xml"  />
  </xi:include>

  <glossary>
    <glossdiv>
      <title>O</title>

      <glossentry>
        <glossterm>OSGi</glossterm>

        <glossdef>
          <para>Open Services Gateway Initiative - a fully fledged plugin
          runtime environment on top of the Java VM - <ulink
          url="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OSGi">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OSGi</ulink>.</para>
        </glossdef>
      </glossentry>
    </glossdiv>

    <glossdiv>
      <title>X</title>

      <glossentry>
        <glossterm>XML</glossterm>

        <glossdef>
          <para>eXtensible Markup Language</para>
        </glossdef>
      </glossentry>

      <glossentry>
        <glossterm>XSD</glossterm>

        <glossdef>
          <para>Xml Schema Definition</para>
        </glossdef>
      </glossentry>
    </glossdiv>
  </glossary>
</book>