Comparison
Microkernel architecturevsPlugin architecture
Microkernel architecture
the product is a small core that does almost nothing, and every feature anyone names is a plugin.
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.
Full entry →Plugin architecture
someone added a feature by dropping in a package, and you did not change or redeploy the application to allow it.
Any design where third-party or optional code is discovered and loaded against a published extension point at runtime. It is the practical form of the open–closed principle at application scale, using late binding to make the extension possible without a rebuild. The costs are the ones every extensible product carries: a versioned contract, a trust boundary and failure isolation, because a plugin's crash is your crash.
Full entry →