Application Plugins are another way to extend CoreMedia Content Cloud applications. The focus of plugins are clear APIs and strong isolation to increase reusability and decrease maintenance effort.

In contrast to classic Blueprint Extensions (see Section 4.1.5, “Project Extensions”), which are usually part of a project's Blueprint and are built together with the application, plugins are meant to be developed and released separately. This way plugins can be packaged with the application at a later time, for example when creating a Docker image or even later, when deploying the application.

Similar to Blueprint Extensions, to implement some feature through plugins, it must be decomposed into parts that plug into exactly one CoreMedia application, and optional parts that are reused in different application plugins (called shared code). The plugin artifacts resulting from these parts can then be bundled via a Plugin Bundle Descriptor (see Section 4.1.6.3, “Plugin Bundles”).

Note

Currently, only Content Hub Connectors can be implemented via the plugin mechanism. More possibilities to convert classic Blueprint extensions to plugins by creating the corresponding extension points and providing the needed Spring beans to plugins will follow in upcoming releases.

For Content Hub Connectors, the Content Hub API in Studio-Server provides an extension point for plugins, and for the localization part, it is now possible to add Studio Client plugins as "dynamic packages" at runtime. Therefore, without adding a Maven dependency to the Studio Client application. More possibilities to convert classic Blueprint Extensions to plugins by creating the corresponding extension points and providing the needed Spring beans to plugins will follow in upcoming releases.

The technology to implement plugins is different for Studio Client than for the other Java based applications, so there are dedicated sections for these two types of plugins, followed by a section explaining how to bundle plugins that together implement some feature.