Question

Web frameworks such as Django and Rails rely on monkey patching to enable support for plugins.

Are there web frameworks, using Python or Ruby, that support plugins without having to resort to monkey patching? And how would it be possible to architect the code to support plugins without monkey patching, especially if one moved to a statically typed language?

Answer 1

I question your definitions of “monkey-patching” and “plugins”.

Django very much so supports “plugins”, though it calls them “packages” or “modules”. Here’s a site that exists only to list available packages for Django:

http://www.djangopackages.com/

I know nothing about Rails, but I’d bet my house it has similar things.