[Catalyst] External plugins

[Brandon Black]

On 2/14/06, Michael Richards <mdrichards at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 2/14/06, Ovid <publiustemp-catalyst at yahoo.com> wrote:
> > We have an app which uses Catalyst.  However, the plugins can
> > theoretically not be Catalyst specific.  As far as I can tell, the only
> > way to use a plugin which doesn't start with "Catalyst::Plugin::" is to
> > do this:
> >
> >   use base 'Some::Plugin::In::Another::Namespace';
>
> Why not write a Catalyst::Plugin:: wrapper around your module? Many
> (most?) Catalyst::Plugin modules are just that.
>

A lot of Catalyst::Plugin modules are indeed just simple wrappers
around existing modules.  The issues with my modules in question is
that:

1) They're really pure Catalyst Plugins, in the sense that there is no
other non-Catalyst module being wrapped, and all of the meat of the
code is highly Catalyst-specific.

2) They're also highly specific to my Cat application(s), so they
don't really "belong" in the Catalyst:: namespace like the "official"
plugins (and might in theory even conflict with some future plugin,
although I've taken steps against that by making the plugins have
names of the form Catalyst::Plugin::MyApplicationName::Foo).

App-specific plugins seem like they would be a common design pattern
to me for a sufficiently complex CatApp.  Much like with the official
plugins, it allows you to cleanly seperate several functionally
distinct bits of code that all need to hook into core Catalyst methods
like ->process() - but they shouldn't really be in the Catalyst::
namespace.

-- Brandon