Tim Child

There is a lot of interesting information about creating plugin architectures using Python all over the web, but its in fairly disparate places. This is an overview of the documentation that I found as of April 2010.

Firstly Dr André Roberge has some very interesting posts, as well as a talk at PyCon 2009 on Blip.tv entitled Plugins and monkeypatching: increasing flexibility, dealing with inflexibility. He is also the author of Crunchy which uses a plugin system. He goes on to write about his experiences in creating a plugin architecture on his blog, over 6 parts starting here on part 1.

Marty Alchin, the author of Pro Django has an interesting couple of pages in that same book about creating a simple plugin system, and the snippet of code is on djangosnippets.com. He also has an excellent blog post about implementing a plugin architecture, it also talks about Django but is fairly non-specific.

William E. Hart over 2009-2010 has also been researching Python Plugin Frameworks, his overview is on his blog and he is also the author of the PyUtilib Component Architecture. This was very recently released and so hasn’t gathered much momentum as of this post but looks very promising indeed.

Zope. The big one is the Zope Component Architecture. I must admit, that looking into it I think its overkill, I don’t like the configuration utility or the overhead it introduces – just to use it requires a lot of extra Zope modules. However google for it if you are interested in learning further.

Yapsy. Yapsy is interesting, looks extremely lightweight, has been around for a few years, is currently on version 1.7 and serves as a good starting point. It has no external dependancies.

SprinklesPy. SprinklesPy is also very lightweight but I am not sure that development is active on it (2006 was the last mention of it being used that I found), or that it has anyone in the community using it (a benefit I believe if you are implementing a system that you are not creating yourself.)

Trac is the one component architecture that frequently gets mentioned, and it has a very decent user base. However, ripping the plugin system out might be more work than is reasonable.

Examples of Plugin use in the wild:

• http://code.google.com/p/oohembed

Other interesting links:

• http://www.charlesleifer.com/blog/looking-registration-patterns-django/
• Stackoverflow thread on minimal plugin architectures
• http://live.gnome.org/Gedit/PythonPluginHowTo

It is clear to me that there is no correct way of implementing plugins and you have to pick based upon the needs of your project, but this should serve as a good starting point. I will add and update this post as my knowledge grows.

This was something that really annoyed me when trying to configure VMWare Player 3, there seemed to be no easy way of changing the IP address range or the DHCP addresses when using Windows as the host OS.

Actually there is but in a stroke of genius by VMWare it isn’t installed properly. The program that you require is called vmnetcfg.exe and is included in the installer but isn’t installed. Its really difficult to find anything about it on VMWare’s site so to get to it:

1. Run the installer with /e option. For example:

All contents will be extracted to “vm” folder.

2. Open “network.cab” and copy vmnetcfg.exe to your installation folder,
typically “C:\Program Files\VMware\VMware Player\”.

Now you can use vmnetcfg.

The weekend we got back from a visit to England primarily to see my parents as it was my Dads 60th Birthday – Happy Birthday! and we also managed to see some friends, and meet up to do a little business.

First stop was London. Its always interesting to go back to the place after having lived there for about 10 years. I forgot how busy SoHo gets during the day, but that was made up by other factors. London is overwhelming with choice, vibrancy and colorful people. One thing that was new to me was how much harder it is to get around with a pram than Stockholm. Here is Harriet at her first visit to an English Pub. She was asked to leave..

After a couple of days we moved on to Bath to visit my cousin and his family. Its always nice to visit Bath, a more relaxed venue than London. It was good to catch up, and we have a brief trip to the farmers market.

Then it was on to Exmouth via a scenic drive. My parents hired a very nice apartment on the sea front which was much appreciated and we could watch the usual English sea-side vacation weather in its full glory.

We took a drive to see some wildlife and black swans.

Visit to a Donkey Sanctuary

Went to the small fishing village of Beer (no we didn’t have a chance to have any):

And at the end a really good get together with a lot of the family for my Dads 60th.