I’m writing a J2SE desktop application that requires one of its components to be pluggable. I’ve already defined the Java interface for this plugin. The user should be able to select at runtime (via the GUI) which implementation of this interface they want to use (e.g. in an initialisation dialog). I envisage each plugin being packaged as a JAR file containing the implementing class plus any helper classes it may require.
What’s the best technology for doing this type of thing in a desktop Java app?
After many tries for plugin-based Java architectures (what is precisely what you seem to look for), I finally found JSPF to be the best solution for Java5 code. it do not have the huge needs of OSGI like solutions, but is instead rather easy to use.