InfoManager

What is it?

InfoManager is a data management plugin that is designed to deal with the issue of many plugins handling similar information. It's role is to act between the implementation of data-changing methods and the plugins that want to make use of that data. It does very little on it's own, but is designed to make development easier and less likely to cause problems for both the server owner and the developer.

An Example?

Money plugins are very common, and it's been an issue for plugin developers that you need to support them all. In this situation, InfoManager acts as a bridge between the money plugin, and the plugin wanting to act on it (such as a trade plugin).

If a trade plugin wants to add 5 money to Dave's account, since he's just sold some wood - it currently would have to check to find which money plugin is active if any - and then process the action specifically suited for that API. Worse still, it may not support all money plugins and server owners could be left choosing which selection of plugins they want - instead of having the choice of any.

InfoManager would prevent this by being the middle-man. The money plugin lets InfoManager know it's there, and know it's capable of handling money. The trade plugin doesn't need to care about this, it simply tells InfoManager that it wants to add to Dave's money, and InfoManager sorts the rest out (handing the request to whichever money plugin is available).

Beyond this, because InfoManager holds the data, not the money plugin - if the money plugin is later swapped for a new one; the money is not lost, a new money plugin can easily pick up where the other one left off with no issues.

So who needs InfoManager

Well, right now it's new and therefore still needing other people to play around with it. Like a library, this plugin would be needed by anybody who uses plugins depending on it - which hopefully is this is successful, would be a lot. However, InfoManager provides no functionality on it's own, so it's not for download unless you have a plugin that requires it.

Documentation

Will be coming soon, but I've got a lot going on, so I need to finish some things first. I will be providing an example as well.

Source Code

https://github.com/Bilkokuya/InfoManager