I've been hacking on the DeploymentComponent such that it can load components dynamically. This is RTT 1.2.0 only though(*). The idea just elaborated on the current XML description for creating data port connections between components. Now the XML file lists also which component is created from which library and which thread to assign to it. This greatly reduces recompilation steps, as a single executable is capable of launching all Orocos applications, by only reading the XML.

The components need no special treatment to fit into this scheme and all existing components can be used, given that each component type lives in one shared library and one C macro line is added to the component's .cpp file. We could invent a second macro which would allow multiple components in one shared library, which would suit the OCL.

(*) More on that to-be-released version later this week.