The Mighty Embeddable Plugin Container

Heiko has just demonstrated another way that the agent-side plugin container can be embedded in any Java VM.

We've already proven that this concept works because the plugin container has already been embedded in a few places: not only does the agent itself embed the plugin container, but our unit tests do it when the validity of plugins needs to be tested and also the Embedded Jopr project does it by embedding the plugin container directly in a JBossAS5 application server!

But what Heiko has done is go a step further by providing a very small, yet useful, wrapper around the plugin container to support plugin developers (it is called the "standalone plugin container"). It is "standalone" because you no longer need to install and run a full Jopr environment (a server and a database) in order to test your plugin's functionality.

If you are writing a custom plugin, just use the standalone plugin container and deploy and execute your plugin. This means you just take an existing agent distribution, and use a very simple script to start the standalone plugin container (there are Windows and UNIX versions of the script). The simplicity of these scripts border on trivial. Under the covers, all this does is run a new main class that embeds the plugin container, as opposed to the original AgentMain class (which does all the complex agent-to-server communications). This new standalone plugin container will accept commands on the prompt to help you exercise your plugin code - a great help for those writing plugins. See the README for some install instructions.

This type of capability sort of existed in the old JBoss ON 1.x code base - but its old (now obsolete) plugin model was never this modular and could never have been this easily embedded in so many different ways.