maven-plugin-plugin/src/site/apt/multiple-language-support.apt

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 Multiple Language Support for the Plugin Plugin: Redesign Notes
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 John Casey
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 2005-02-09
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<<THIS NEEDS REVISION AND CLEANING UP>>

*Abstract

  The Plugin Plugin needs to be refactored in order to support multiple mojo
  implementation languages. This document will detail the steps needed to
  add this functionality.

*Current Status

  The Plugin Plugin currently calls out to a set of generators in the
  maven-plugin-tools library, which in turn uses QDox to generate various things
  based on annotations in the java source code.

*Refactored Design

  The new design will have a generator-manager which is a component that the
  plugin mojos will lookup. This component will have access to a mapping of all
  generators and the language they're registered for. It'll iterate through the
  mappings, and extract mojo descriptors from all relevant scripts/sources using
  each language's registered generator. Results from each generator will be
  centrally aggregated by the generator-manager. After all generators have run,
  the generator-manager will call another class (depending on what it's meant to
  produce) to take all the aggregated mojo descriptors and produce a result
  (such as <<<plugin.xml>>> file for the project).