> > Von: "Amit Kumar Saha" <amitsaha.in@xxxxxxxxx> > > Is there any way to make GIMP plugins themselves extensible. My point > > here is that, can we make a GIMP plugin which allows itself modifiable > > by a end-user to include a new functionality without much of a hassle > > on part of the end-user. The trick here isn't creating an extensible plugin. The trick is defining what "without much hassle on the part of the end-user" really means. Who's the end user? Joe Artist or Edward Engineer? Sven's granny or a bunch of kernel developers? In general, making a piece of software extensible requires two main components: a grammer understandable by the core software and an API accessible through that grammer to core functionality. One problem you'll have to address is what parts of the API are visible to the plugins and what parts are not. To make a piece of software extendable you could ignore the API portion and create a simple grammer that end users could use to essentially configure the plugin. Imagine a simplistic scripting language that simply sets a bunch of variables that the main plugin normally requires you to set manually using a series of dialogs or tabs. Wouldn't even require anything as complex as Perl or Python - it could just be a series of name/value pairs. But this isn't really extension, its configuration. More complex examples would include exactly what GIMP already does with it's language extensions. You can load a dll easily enough or embed an interpreter like Perl or Python. But is programming in Perl or Python "easy" to your end user? A more common approach these days is to allow extension via XML. You can easily embed an XML parser into a plugin (I've used libXML2 in my plugins to save configuration data). But then you have to decide if writing XML by hand is easy for your users. Not to mention defining the XML Schema or DTD for the language. In the end, though, what you've done is create a new programming language. If you're doing that, and started with the intention of making it easy to use, you might as well use a well known language like Perl or Python instead. You could provide a series of core features in the plugin that could be used in a reorderable stack and then build a GUI that used drag and drop to rearrange that stack. Sort of like arranging a series of existing plugins to be run in any given order. The plugin would then process in the order defined by the stack. The problem here is that you're simply providing a mechanism for using existing features, not allowing the user to extend that feature set. So before you decide on the mechanism, you have to define who will use it and what you're really trying to allow them to do. > Does any one know of a method to do this or > > any GIMP plugin which already does this? I'm not aware of any plugins that provide this though it wouldn't suprise me if someone had already done something similar. Plugin interfaces are a standard part of many applications these days but I think you'd be hard pressed to find any that don't require some level of programming expertise to use. -- Michael J. Hammel Senior Software Engineer mjhammel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx http://graphics-muse.org ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Memory is a Net - Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. _______________________________________________ Gimp-developer mailing list Gimp-developer@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://lists.XCF.Berkeley.EDU/mailman/listinfo/gimp-developer
