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The Future of Plugins in Gideros — Gideros Forum

The Future of Plugins in Gideros

john26john26 Maintainer
edited November 2015 in General questions
I want to start a discussion about plugins in Gideros. Currently adding features like ads and IAP to a Gideros exported project is quite time consuming as it involves manually copying files from the Gideros install directory. It is also necessary to make changes to the manifest file and main activity (in the case of Android). And of course, you have to do it again when exporting for a different OS, and yet again when upgrading using a new version of Gideros. Now that Gideros supports 7 targets the situation is likely to get out even more difficult. To address this we are considering several options:

The first option is that the user can chose which plugins he wants by ticking boxes within Gideros Studio which exports those files along with the rest of the project (referencing these as necessary in the manifest, project files). This would be the cleanest way, but it involves a lot of coding in Gideros Studio and this coding needs to be specific to each plugin and each OS. So there might be a delay in getting this to work.

The other option is to supplement the existing "bare bones" export with an optional "kitchen sink" export which includes all available plugins including all ads, IAP, social media, etc available in the Gideros repo. These files will of course also be referenced in the project files, manifest files etc. If you don't need all that stuff you can just delete the excess libraries but you will need to alter the manifest etc to reflect this. The idea here is that its easier to delete stuff than to add stuff. We would also bundle libraries that you currently need to download from external websites like Flurry and maintain these in the repo as part of Gideros. This approach is much easier for us to code but you may end up with a bloated export and some manual intervention is needed to remove stuff. The current "bare bones" export would still be available also.

So what is your experience of using plugins and how should they evolve in future? The original idea of plugins dates back to when Gideros was closed source and people needed to do intensive computations in native code or link to unusual 3rd party APIs. But I suspect most people are using them now for ads etc and mainly using the "standard" plugins provided by Gideros. In that case it might be better to export these by default. Please let me know how it works for you and what would be the best way to develop in future.

Likes: NatWobble

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