Comments on: GNOME Do and The Network Backed Plugin Architecture http://redmonk.com/sogrady/2008/06/23/network-plugin-architecture/ because technology is just another ecosystem Wed, 03 Dec 2008 00:23:29 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.6.3 By: andres http://redmonk.com/sogrady/2008/06/23/network-plugin-architecture/#comment-468972 andres Sat, 13 Sep 2008 23:02:14 +0000 http://redmonk.com/sogrady/?p=2076#comment-468972 Nice read. I liked your article. :P Nice read. I liked your article. :P

]]> By: Bill Jackson http://redmonk.com/sogrady/2008/06/23/network-plugin-architecture/#comment-420387 Bill Jackson Sat, 28 Jun 2008 03:16:53 +0000 http://redmonk.com/sogrady/?p=2076#comment-420387 Err... your Firefox 3's Add-ons dialog is modal? Is that specific to the Linux version or something? Sounds annoying! ;) Anyway, another great example of this model is JetBrains' IntelliJ IDEA; just like with Firefox, the repository is centralized, with some yummy statistics made available, and finding/installing/updating/bug-reporting plugins is well-integrated into the IDE. My only complaint is that, like Firefox, it still requires a restart to activate changes (and it's far less trivial than restarting Firefox, even if you're like me and tend to have 100+ tabs open at a time). As for "what took so long", it seems to me that the obstacle for most projects is that this requires one or more people to fill a few different roles: a) someone with the desire and initiative to actually drive the change, b) someone to design and implement a reliable browse/search/install/update mechanism, c) someone to provide infrastructure (paying for hosting or working to get a reliable free-hosting setup, buying a domain name, et cetera), d) someone to maintain the repository when it is all done. I think a generic framework could be developed that would take care of (b), (c) isn't much of an obstacle with a little work and tolerance for ugly domains ;), and a bundled management webapp could make (d) trivial. What do you think? Err… your Firefox 3’s Add-ons dialog is modal? Is that specific to the Linux version or something? Sounds annoying! ;)

Anyway, another great example of this model is JetBrains’ IntelliJ IDEA; just like with Firefox, the repository is centralized, with some yummy statistics made available, and finding/installing/updating/bug-reporting plugins is well-integrated into the IDE. My only complaint is that, like Firefox, it still requires a restart to activate changes (and it’s far less trivial than restarting Firefox, even if you’re like me and tend to have 100+ tabs open at a time).

As for “what took so long”, it seems to me that the obstacle for most projects is that this requires one or more people to fill a few different roles:
a) someone with the desire and initiative to actually drive the change,
b) someone to design and implement a reliable browse/search/install/update mechanism,
c) someone to provide infrastructure (paying for hosting or working to get a reliable free-hosting setup, buying a domain name, et cetera),
d) someone to maintain the repository when it is all done.

I think a generic framework could be developed that would take care of (b), (c) isn’t much of an obstacle with a little work and tolerance for ugly domains ;), and a bundled management webapp could make (d) trivial. What do you think?

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