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 Descriptor (see Section 4.1.6.3, “Plugin Descriptors and Bundled Plugins”).

The technology to implement plugins is different for Studio Client than for the 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.