An extension mechanism and its application to educational software for real-time control experiment

When designing the architecture and function of software, researchers often encounter the demand to enhance the extensibility of the software. To realize flexible extensibility, this paper presents an extension mechanism to enhance the extensibility from three aspects: architecture, function and interface. The flexible architecture is achieved by using Rich Client Platform (RCP) platform which has a micro-kernel. The function dynamic adding ability is achieved by using the plug-in mechanism. Customized extension of function interface is achieved by using the scripting technology. The proposed extension mechanism is applied in the EasyControl software which is designed for real-time control education. The experiment shows that the proposed mechanism can effectively improve the extensibility of the software.