Development, Deployment, and Rating of Plug-Ins

In this paper, we present a lightweight but powerful plug-in container which provides advanced features such as dynamic class loading, dependency, configuration, and security management. We highlight the deployment mechanism which allows to publish, install, and update plug-ins from arbitrary sources at runtime. Furthermore, we introduce the Trooth voting and trust system which is used to assess plug-ins but has been designed as a general rating mechanism. Finally, we present the extensible architecture of the Spamato spam filter framework and show how it employs the plug-in mechanism and the Trooth system in a real-world application.