As I was working on the Resin’s NetBeans plug-in I started to realize that we needed to change the model we use for plugins. Previously, we packaged Resin’s classes with the plugins. That presented us with number of challenges ranging from keeping the plugins in sync with the Resin’s code to having to release the plugins every time we release a new version of Resin.

The solution was in introducing a level of indirection that came in the form an updated Resin CLI interface. Initially, the interface is extended with the commands required for the plugin to work. That included the deployment commands and web-application administration commands.
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