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Hi, I am writing a MapViewer application which will support plugins. I am currently trying to define an interface for my plug-ins but I keep asking myself the same question: Why don't I just had one method, initialize() which takes a MainWindow* pointer then all plug-ins become "general" and can connect to any signal they want to?
Due to Qt's excellent signal/slot mechanism this seems like the way to go - why limit your plug-ins to a specific interface? Am I missing something obvious here?
One of the advantages of plugins is the possibility for third party to add functionality to an app. Consider an image filter-plugin: Which method is used to set the input image, which one for getting the output image? Specifiying the interface solves this problem.Quote:
Due to Qt's excellent signal/slot mechanism this seems like the way to go - why limit your plug-ins to a specific interface? Am I missing something obvious here?
In fact, the interface thing has nothing to do with plugins. In case of the image filter it's the same for a non-plugin approach. You could write a new class for every image filter, but this won't be useable - instead you make a Filter interface (or a baseclass).