In Iguana, a plugin is an application that communicates with Iguana using the Iguana communications libraries. There are two types of Iguana plugins:

• A source plugin connects to the From Plugin source component of an Iguana channel and sends messages to the channel;
• A destination plugin connects to the To Plugin destination component of an Iguana channel and receives messages from the channel.

	In versions of Iguana prior to version 4.0, plugins were called client executables.

Iguana supports the following languages and development environments for Iguana plugins:

• C++
• C# and VB.NET
• Java
• Delphi

	New Feature in Iguana 4.1 Java and Delphi support is new in Iguana 4.1.

Plugins are supported on the following platforms:

• Windows
• Linux
• Unix
• Mac OS X

64-bit plugin support is provided for the following language/platform combinations:

• C++ on Windows with Visual Studio 2008 and later
• C++ on Linux, Unix or Mac OS X
• Java with Java 2 Platform 5 (1.5.0) and later on Windows, Linux, Unix or Mac OS X
• VB.NET and C# on Windows with Visual Studio 2005 and later

	New Feature in Iguana 4.1 Support for 64-bit plugins is new in Iguana 4.1.

	The plugin interface for C# and VB.NET is different from that used in version 4.0 and older of Iguana. The legacy plugin interface is still provided, but using the new version is strongly recommended.

The following sections describe:

• How source plugins and destination plugins deal with messages;
• How to write a plugin;
• How to create the channel that the plugin connects to;
• How to test your plugin;
• How to use client_exe to test your channel;
• How to monitor plugin output.

	For examples of how to connect a plugin to an Iguana channel, see Setting Up a Plugin. For information on the API that plugins use to interface with Iguana, see the following pages: For C++ plugins: CHM, CHMnet and IGC Libraries Data Structures For C# and VB.NET plugins: iNTERFACEWARE.Iguana.Plugin Namespace For Java plugins: Overview (iNTERFACEWARE Java Stubcode) (click the link to the com.interfaceware.iguana.plugin package) For Delphi plugins: IGC Iguana Plugin Package

	When your plugin creates or receives a message, it can retrieve the message log ID for this message. The log message ID uniquely identifies the message in Iguana. If you store this message log ID in a database table, you can use it to obtain a direct link to the Iguana log entry for the message. For more details on how to use the message log ID, see Using the Message Log ID in VMD Files.