I'm interested in creating a program in which I can later extend the functionality of the program with modules or plugins, without having to change the code to the original program. Ideally I'd like to create a main program, and upon startup let it check for plugins/or modules, and incorporate that functionality too. Does anyone know of any resources for this kind of paradigm. I'll probably be writing the main program in Java but I'm more interested in seeing how this sort of thing is implemented, so it doesn't matter which language. Thanks for any help.

Well, for platform specific you could look into libdl (dlopen(), dlclose(), dlsym()) for Linux, and getProcAddress for Windows. Just google them. If you don't want it platform specific than I suggest a scripting language, such as Python: www.python.org

Hope that helps.

Thanks for your reply. I don't think that's what I'm looking for though. I'm looking to build a base program, and then extend the functionality of that program by incorporating modules without ever having to modify the base program. I intended to implement this in probably Java, and didn't want to worry about platform specifics. If anyone has any ideas or links of resources for this kind of paradigm, please send them along. Thanks.

With Java, dynamic class loading can be done with the Class.forName method.