Platform modules from 3rd parties - how to expose them?

Greetings community members.

I'm the author of modules that may be relevant to developers of NB Platform
applications.

However I feel that such modules need a home (binary repo) from where
developers can easily pull them into their application at build time.
Plugins.netbeans.org serves a different purpose, namely to keep an
application updated *after* it has been deployed.

Basically I'm thinking that - in an ideal world - plugins.netbeans.org
could pose as a Maven repo as well, in addition to what it does today. This
would solve the problem as I see it. This could be done without changes to
existing upload process as the pom which was used to build NBM is actually
buried deep inside the .nbm file. In cases where this is not the case we
could simply not expose. In other words:  All entries in the site would be
exposed as plugins as today (via UC and the UI) but only a subset would
also be exposed as modules (via Maven repo model).

I've been working a lot lately with Vaadin. Basically this is their model
for 3rd party add-ons, meaning these are hosted in a special Maven repo
which has an upload UI, but to the builder this is nothing but a Maven
repo. The model seems to be immensely successful for Vaadin. Their 3rd
party add-on directory is really huge. Personally I was "willing" to
publish add-ons to the community only after having worked with Vaadin for 3
months. This willingness comes from the fact that it is dead easy to
publish but also that is it dead easy for others to utilize whatever you
publish.

Let me summarize: The plugin model is fine. It caters to end users who can
get their deployed application updated. But I would like to make it easier
for developers to share modules with each other. Right now there doesn't
seem to be a market for this but I believe this is mainly due to the fact
that the vehicle for this is missing.

Thoughts on this ?

Peter