Re: Self-configuring classes

This is a general design question.

I'd like a developer to be able to be able to write his own class that
implements one of our interfaces. The developer would then register the
class with our app which would use it. Our app would discover what
configuration parameters the class needed, and then throw up a page in
our UI so an end user could fill them in.

The question is, what is the best way for the class to tell the app what
parameters it requires? Are there any good design patterns for this?

I could use reflection to discover all the setXXX() methods on the
class, but I'm not sure this is flexible enough, plus I don't like
reflection.

JMX sort-of purports to do this kind of thing, but it's kind of ugly as
well. At least it was when I looked at it a couple years ago.