The plug-in manager provides a framework that enables you to write extensions to virtual member manager, to consume a variety of services that can be added in the future.
Some examples are policy management, event notification, and manipulation of group membership.
The plug-in manager listens in on various virtual member manager application programming interface (API) calls and routes the requests to various subscribers based on their topic subscriptions. The topic subscriptions are listed in the wimconfig.xml file.
The plug-in manager is based on the publish-subscribe model that is illustrated here.
Topic emitters consist of various points inside virtual member manager, which are of interest to topic subscribers. All topic emitters must follow the Service Data Object (SDO) framework.
Topic subscribers are plug-ins that topic emitters call in the order defined in the virtual member manager configuration file.
Some examples of topic subscriber functions are credential capture, event notification, and soft groups.
There are two types of topic subscribers:
Each topic emitter has two logical points that call topic subscribers:
A sample plug-in is provided to familiarize you with the features of the plug-in manager framework. Instructions to code, compile, and deploy the plug-in are in vmmsampleplugin.jar, which you can download from the developerWorks wiki page, Sample virtual member manager plug-in for WebSphere Application Server Version 6.1 and above.