Personally, I think your system is overly complex. A "plug-in" is basically an entity that conforms to a given API that can be activated at runtime. I call this concept "intelligent classes". For futher info, see Re^3: Style or Clarity?. Basically, this is an advanced version of a dispatch table.

As for your passing information back and forth ... for the most part, this doesn't require a context object. It merely requires that all the plugins return the same data structure back from a given API function. A context object should only be used when there is actual context required. For further info, see what I did with PDF::Template and Excel::Template. I actually implemented a plug-in architecture for those classes, allowing for user-defined classes to be defined at runtime in order to handle custom tags. (The API is a little rough and mostly unpublished, but the architecture is still correct.)

In other words, it's good to bring this concept into the fore, but you made it more complicated than it needed to be.

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