CODEWITHSUNDEEP
macoscocoansbundle
Nicholas
Nicholas

Reputation: 85

Frameworks vs. Bundles

I want to be able to add plugins for an application I am developing and as it is a development tool I want other people to be able to write their own plugins.

So my questions are what are the real differences between a framework and a loadable bundle? Which are more suited to being a plugin(accessing of headers, ect) ? And if I use loadable bundles how do I load them at runtime and access their functionality during development?

The plugins should not have to rely on other plugins.

Upvotes: 6

Views: 3672

Answers (2)

Sozin's Comet
Sozin's Comet

Reputation: 493

Elaborating on the accepted answer, a bundle is more designed to be loaded and then potentially unloaded at a later time during program execution. Frameworks, once loaded are designed to stick around for the life of the process.

Frameworks are also designed to be self contained units of code where a caller calls into the APIs the frameworks exports. Bundles can be used when you want to have code call into the caller's public APIs. Check out ld64's man page. You can get hints for the intended usage of bundles with such options like -bundle_loader

Upvotes: 1

Caleb
Caleb

Reputation: 124997

Have you taken a look at NSBundle? It has all the methods you'll need to load the executable code at runtime. You'll want to define some sort of plugin interface to which any plugin will conform.

As for the difference between bundles and frameworks... Both bundles and frameworks are file structures that contain various resources that your app can use. A framework is like a library -- it's something your program links against when you build it. A bundle, on the other hand, is essentially a folder structure containing compiled code that you load at runtime.

Upvotes: 6

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