Plugin Development

[jdbranham]

How do we streamline the plugin development process, and potentially replace or refactor the current toolkit.
I don't think the developer experience is great when creating/debuggin a plugin.

There are a few places for opportunity -

• Scaffolding a plugin project
• Building/packaging a plugin
• Testing a plugin

Maybe there's an opportunity to create a custom gradle plugin that simplifies the project structure and choreographs the build process.

Regarding the build/bundling of a plugin - it needs to be bundled without certain libraries that are already bundled as part of the Sprout WebApp.

We currently use webpack configs to manage it - but maybe there's a better bundler, or some modifications to the webpack configs/process that would simplify it.
Or maybe we could even generate the correct bundling configs in a plugin project at build time. :thinking_face:

The current toolkit is a modified [early] version of the Grafana toolkit.
The plugin code in general, was greatly influenced by Grafana, and some of the code came from the Grafana UI project.

Another source of inspiration may be the Apache Superset UI project.
It would be great to hear other suggestions on how to improve the plugin system, or development process.

[jdbranham]

This looks interesting -

https://single-spa.js.org/

[jdbranham]

Added a proof-of-concept using single-spa.
https://github.com/savantly-net/sprout-platform/tree/master/frontend#micro-frontends-poc

[jdbranham]

Architecture ideas -