External modules

[TeresiaOlsson]

For another project (future development of OPA) I have been looking at the architecture for Spyder and discovered ideas that I thought maybe also could be interesting for pyAML and our requirement to be able to use external lab specific modules for devices etc.

Since Spyder is an IDE they want the users to be able to develop their own plugins. Their provide an API for this. But what they also do is that they define a standard for how third-party plugins need to be named for them to be automatically discovered by Spyder and a template to start from when developing a new plugin.

Here is a tutorial which describes the process they use: https://docs.spyder-ide.org/current/workshops/plugin-development.html. Not all of it is of interest to us of course, but I thought it was very interesting that if packages are named spyder_xxx they are automatically detected if installed in the same environment (I guess by some discovery service) and that they use cookiecutter to help the users to create the initial structure so they don't have to start from scratch.

[GamelinAl]

If your idea is to provide a similar structure (API, template and autodiscovery for plugins) for pyAML, I think it could be nice to have in the future.

For lab-specific features, we already decided that pyAML should be extensible but it could be very nice to provide a "clean" way to do that so future update of pyAML don't break lab-specific plugins.

[TeresiaOlsson]

Yes, that was my thinking. Some kind of interface and template so if you want to add an extension you have something to help you get started. And also to make it easier if it later turns out that the lab-specific feature you implemented is useful for so many labs that it should be turned into a standard part.