Posted by asotobu on Aug 19, 2013; 7:08pm
URL: https://discuss.asciidoctor.org/Finally-a-draft-of-the-Asciidoctor-extension-API-has-landed-tp455p468.html

Hi Dan,

I have been thinking about how to implement extensions in Asciidoctor Java Integration. The first part, the easy one is about registering the extensions, for this case, I will implement a Registry class (more or less like Asciidoctor) which will deal with registration part of Java classes, it will be composed by one Ruby class and one Java interface.

But where I find a lot of work is in some kind of extensions:

for example a preprocessor is very easy, it receives a list of Strings and returns a list of Strings, no problem because conversion is done by JRuby. But for example in case of BlockMacroProcesor, there are more attributes which we should inspect and possibly bind manually to Java interfaces. There is no problem in doing in that way but it will require some effort of manual mapping. Moreover to avoid Asciidoc problem with Filters (aka Extensions) of calling directly CLI, we will need to provide a Block class in Java so users can use it too to create new blocks.

Another problem will be how to register Ruby extensions directly from Asciidoctor Java Integration, I think that with a simple overload of register method would be enough. But for now I will release a preview version where from Java part you will be only available to register Java extensions.

Now that I have things more clear, it is time to code a bit :D. Only last thing when have you planned to merge pull request to master branch?