Design patterns·The shape of the whole application
the product is a small core that does almost nothing, and every feature anyone names is a plugin.
Microkernel architecture
Also calledplug-in architecture core, microkernel, core plus plugins
A minimal core system providing the mechanism, with all the actual features supplied as plug-in modules. Editors, browsers, CI systems and most extensible products are built this way. The hard part is never the loading — it is the plugin contract, because it becomes an API you cannot change once anyone has written against it.