Plugins that implement their own command set

[ned]

I'm investigating implementing a system in which plugins will implement their own set of commands. The main program will need some way to query the plugin for which commands it supports as well as the parameters and outputs from each command, and to execute those commands. Has anyone built something like this before? If so, any suggestions, warnings, or sample code to share? Initially I plan to build all the plugins as LabVIEW classes, although there's some possibility that later I will need to change it to a DLL or RPC mechanism to allow plugins to be written in other languages (I'm hoping that could be done by writing a simple LabVIEW wrapper around them).

[todd]

I've seen one with a variant attribute table. "Get variant attributes" with no name returned the list of commands. Using a command name returned parameter and return value information via type descriptors.

 

Another one used xmlrpc as the inter-platform pipe. A "query" command returned the list of functions.