What are the advantages and disadvantages of plug-in based architecture?

Posted by RP on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by RP
Published on 2010-05-12T11:43:07Z Indexed on 2010/05/15 5:54 UTC
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subjective

I want to do the architectural design for a software that can be used integrate various third party software’s (executable) under one platform.

Standard project types will be added to the platform by default. The project type defines the way in which the different software will be executed and their input and output files.

The user can customize the available standard project type and that will be added to the platform as new project type which defines new custom execution flow.

Also it should support easy extension and customization of the features. I read that plug-in based architecture supports both.

What are the advantages and disadvantages of plug-in based architecture? Do we have any better architecture which can be used for this kind of scenario?

Thanks in advance:)

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