Extending your applications
Very often applications need to be extended with additional functionalities. In many cases it is also necessary to run different code on various types of machines.
A good solution to this problem is to introduce extensibility to our application. We'll want to allow additional modules to be deployed to specified clients—this means delivering modules to clients, keeping them up to date, and handling loading and unloading of modules.
The following sections will introduce how Starkits and Tcl's VFS can be used to easily create modules for our application, and how these can be used to deploy additional code.
We'll also introduce a simple implementation of handling modules, both on server side and client side. This requires creating code for downloading modules themselves, loading them, and the mechanism for telling clients what actions they should be performing.
The server will be responsible for telling clients when they should load or unload any of the modules. They...
