Many small plugins VS fewer big ones

[Vilmos Kozma, módosítva 12 év-val korábban]

Hi Community!

Recently, we've been crossed an interesting question: which approach is better, to have many plugins -one for each portlet- or to have only a few encompassing many portlets.

As much as I understood both solutions has its pros and cons regarding deploy time and administration tasks but is there a thumb of rule for choosing one? Or any ideas and thoughts on this?

Regards,
Vili

[David H Nebinger, módosítva 12 év-val korábban]

Your biggest issue will be runtime resource consumption. Separate WAR files, containing separate plugins, will definitely work, but they will tend to consume more resources.

For example, say you have 5 spring-based portlets which use a spring-based business layer loaded at startup. In a single WAR file, the 5 portlets can share a single Spring context with one copy of the business layer beans. In 5 separate WARs, each of the portlets will be creating a separate copy of the Spring context, resulting in separate (but equal) copies of the business layer beans. Memory requirements go up as a result.

We initially went down the road of having separate plugin projects but after analyzing the runtime impact, we merged the separate plugins into a single WAR and were much happier with the result.

There are general recommendations such as not mixing the different types of plugins into a single project, especially if there is no inherent dependencies (i.e. don't mix a theme with a hook unless the theme requires the hook to function properly).