Cool Firefox tips from Jon Udell: More Firefox search plugins I once described Eclipse as a $40M port of Emacs to an IBMer - which don't go down too well. But that occurs to me that Firefox with its plugin approach is not a dissimiliar way of manging things to Eclipse. Now, you can make deep alterations in Emacs, given its Lisp-fu nature. Powerful, but you might end up mortally wounded. The Eclipse/Moz approach to this seems to be different - don't muck with the core and make sure you don't have to by keeping it very small and manage extensibility via plugins. I think you can characterize that as more directing and structured than the Emacs approach. I wonder if we're not compensating limited flexibility in the programming languages by building flexible and reflective containers instead, that you manage through a ConfigurationLanguage. And I think we're well aware by now that one way to tie someone into a container based on an open standard is through the ConfigurationLanguage. Perhaps we should ask if this the right road to go down - at what point does the kernel become an interpreter? Maybe what we need is not a middleware container, but a middleware interpreter. Which brings me onto micro-kernels and lightweight containers in Java. I wonder if there's any real difference between a deployment and a plug-in, and whether we can't compare containers to interpreters in that case. Here's a question. Which of the current crop of Java container/kernel architectures do you think supports the plugin model well?...
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