JMatter Blog: Plugin Inversion

Plugin Inversion

Eitan Suez — Thu, 29 Jun 2006 09:48:00 -0500

Between writing the documentation for jMatter, doing the InfoQ interview last week, and writing a soon-to-be-published article, I've found myself many times asking the same question: how can I describe jMatter succinctly?

It's most interesting that when one looks once more at something he (or she) believes he already knows, one ends up discovering new things, or new ways of looking at the same thing. So here's a new way of thinking about jMatter (which is never entirely correct, but contains kernels of truth), which I stumbled upon and which I find to be somewhat delightful, somewhat humorous.

jMatter can be described as inverting the idea of a plugin. It's an application that defines a plugin API for a domain model. Different developers will write different domain models into jMatter and each will end up with a different application, where all conform to the same user interface conventions, and all have many similar or consistent features.

Thinking about this some more, we discover that there's a tremendous upside to this way of doing things: as users, we often complain about the cost of learning to become a power user, the cost of learning the user interface for a given software application, of discovering its behaviour, what to do, what not to do, etc... Each software application has its own user interface. With jMatter, all applications have the same, consistent user interface. Learn to become a power user with one, and you're instantly rewarded by the fact that you can use any jMatter application, irrespective of the domain. I think that's powerful stuff. And it promises to collectively save us thousands of man-hours.

"Plugin Inversion" by ajbodoc@yahoo.com

Sat, 09 Sep 2006 16:55:10 -0500

Hi, This framework is very good. It provide a more complete implementation of the naked object pattern. I will try to use it for a concrete application, but I have any questions:

There are any application in production, with a much object, who is build with Jmatter?

There are example application, whit numeric types.

When it will have a new features like: -annotation for metadata. -hibernate (or ejb3) annotation. -java generic collections

I speak spanish, and read english, but no more write or speak english. Sorry for my bad english.

Antonio Bodoc

"Plugin Inversion" by precisely!

Tue, 04 Jul 2006 19:20:16 -0500

well said. thanks for the comment. i agree.

"Plugin Inversion" by Nat

Mon, 03 Jul 2006 09:00:32 -0500

Isn't that the concept behind J2EE? You write some "beans" that define your domain model and you get all this middleware stuff for free.

The only difference is that J2EE doesn't give you a huge amount of stuff, and is very complicated.