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[cologic <587597@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

http://lcsd05.cs.tamu.edu/slides/keynote.pdf has a nice presentation on
this topic, entitled "How to Design a Good API and Why it Matters" by
Joshua Bloch. It points out some specific hazards and advantages. Some
of the more interesting suggestions:

-It's probably useful to have three distinct plugins to test an API to ensure it actually supports distinct usages.
-It's harder to remove things later than add them, so it's worth being conservative and risking perhaps not supporting all use cases rather than getting it wrong and having to support that indefinitely.

It has some other comments too, but those are less notable
(documentation is useful. Surprise!).

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/587597

Title:
  Plugins support

Status in DC++:
  In Progress

Bug description:
  Ok, I'll leave out the sales pitch... here is a potential patch for adding support for plugins to DC++, compiles cleanly (ie. shouldn't generate any warnings) under mingw and visual studio of course and has been tested and working.

The code itself has been in ApexDC++ for a while so it has gotten real life use as well, of course migrating it to clean DC++ needed a few changes here and there but nothing major.

Should also compile and work on linux as it is... but this I have not had chance to test at all so that is just on paper for now.

The major difference between this patch and what's in ApexDC++ is that it does not include a full settings page for plugins which ApexDC++ has. This is simply because I don't know a squat about DWT. Instead this patch has set of chat commands added, so you can play around with the plugins, but if this gets accepted then I certainly hope someone is willing to invest into a settings page for usability sake.

Oh and few changes to the code come directly from bcdcpp, you'll spot them I am sure :).

As for the plugins currently three exists.. a pure C sample that (you guessed it) really doesn't do anything productive and then a plugin version of bcdcpp's lua (this one is pretty direct port, so it is C++).

The third one is not so impressive... it adds support for various media player chat announces (spam is too negative of a word), although primarily I created it to proof that it is possible to make a plugin that modifies the GUI, even though the API itself has little to no support for such plugin (on windows anyways),

The first two plugins can be compiled with both mingw and visual studio and are also hopefully linux friendly, the third not so much.

Oh and you can mix plugins... so mingw compiled dcpp will cope just fine with visual studio compiled plugins or vice versa (obviously this also means that the stl's used can be different). In theory you should also be able to create plugins with languages such as VB and Delphi but this very much theoretical.

Well do what you want with it... it's posted now.