how do we extended ejabberd

While maintaining ejabberd based instant messenger in 2015-2018 we used https://github.com/altenwald/ecomponent to extend ejabberd functionality with new features. Even ejabberd supports own plugin architecture we found it is more convenient to add functionality on top ejabberd without much intrusion in the code. Ecomponent communicates with ejabberd via XEP-0114 protocol. What is ecomponent. It is an independent piece of functionality that can receive and send messages through ejabberd. In ejabberd message router you can invoke ecomponent , inject to it user data. It is very modular and flexible architecture. Ecomponent supports XMPP external components XEP-0114 protocol and provides dynamic enabling and service discovery in ejabberd. Use cases of ecomponent use in our work are : user upload images moderation via Google Gloud Vision service; user reactions module; user geolocation information module and many others. Basically all extension for ejaberd were made with ecomponent. So i highly recommend this way to ejabberd developers