Component Oriented Programming? I let you decide if that is what I mean. I’ve read several discussion on the topic Component Oriented Programming vs. Object Oriented Programming and I am personally one of those who believes the two strategies are complementary and not in competition. As I am not interested in debating the theoretical differences, I would stick to what I normally do and not what I think.That is one of the reasons I’ve always liked - and I still like - OSGi and that is also one of the reasons I’ve been always attracted by the Grails Plugins architecture.
The components oriented approach did not always pay off. Occasionally I just gave up when I found myself fighting with the technology of the moment, which was getting a little on the way. I am sure most of my problems were related to my limited knowledge of that particular technology... still, deadlines are deadlines and I needed to get things done.I am certainly not the first nor the last developer celebrating the Grails Plugin Oriented Architecture. Here is a blog post that shows how a domain class defined in a plugin can be reused by other components of the architecture.
However, I have been thinking about the OSGi-based Eclipse architecture for a long time and I even tried to develop a lighter Java framework for developing applications along the same lines. Naturally, since I've been using Grails, I’ve been thinking on how to reproduce the same behavior in web applications by using Grails plugins. Basically I am talking about conveniently leveraging plugins to benefit from all the perks of the Grails platform: domain classes, services, controllers and views. I will defer to future posts some of the technical details. Meanwhile I wish to provide a little context.
I am thinking of leveraging the plugin architecture for a project called CATCH that I’ve been working on for a tiny grant awarded by Harvard Library Labs. As the Domeo Annotation Tool already provided some of the features I need for CATCH I've decided to refactor and spin off some of its components. I've created a new GitHub project called Annotation Framework which will collect all the new improved modules that will be later used by both Domeo and CATCH.
CATCH Annotation Hub
The goal of CATCH is to provide a hub for collecting/searching and sharing annotation produced by several clients. These includes the Domeo annotation client, HighBrow - an annotation client developed at Harvard by Reinhard Engels - and annotator.js an open-source JavaScript library and tool - developed by Nick Stenning - that can be added to any webpage to make it annotatable.Both CATCH and the older sister project Domeo are meant to be installed in several instances that should be able to communicate with each other in a federated architecture. You can think this as a series of Annotation Framework Nodes that are distributed and connected so that when a user performs a search on one of the nodes, it can also find results that have been created and stored in other authorized/linked nodes. All with access control...
