Allow user easy develop a plugin

General discussion
1

Hi Speckle Team,

I have an idea want to discuss, it will be useful if we allow user easy develop a plugin to increase the efficiency of your tools like Figma in speckle platform, any in roadmap in speckle team ?
Some plugin user can create like :

I’m sure that when this is achieved, speckle will go faster and further than ever with the contributions of the developers.

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A fascinating discussion/ proposal — one that has a common dna with some of the Speckle retreat hacks

In the spirit of your open conversation invitation , perhaps I could ask some open questions to the forum.

Speckle has a few „surfaces“ that a user / developer interfaces with:

  • server
  • frontend
  • connectors
  • third party apps

The open Speckle Schema and SDKs are the obvious raw material - but where would the developer community contribute plug-ins most, what infrastructure to support plugins would a developer need?

What are the advantages of a plug-in architecture over and above the ability to customise the full opensource stack.
A few ideas that have floated around:

  • frontend/viewer hooks
  • installable responsive functions

Connectors seems the least attractive extensible component other than Kits becoming more available across connectors. These are anticipated to work like plugins for extending the object model for specific industry/use-cases, but could their be a Kits marketplace?

Would anyone like to offer themselves for a panel discussion at the next community standup?

Thanks for the topic @chuongmep !!

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I can further justify my discussion with a little bit of English, which is not my official language.
I know that speckle has a very complete stack right now that helps developers do the crazy things they want, however I have the following basic example, I have a nail and I need to get a hammer for nailing I just go to the store to buy a hammer or whatever I need without too much effort, once I’m done with the purchase, if I feel ok I will give a good review and people like me will use it.
As well as the utilities found in Revit, Autocad, … I’ve seen industry-wide repetition in tools at each company with automation tools. Furthermore, I looked at Grasshopper, Dynamo, and it has a rich library. However, these utility tools are all under the desktop and I looked at Figma, they did this amazing in the cloud, when I use the Rider IDE, the utilities are just too good, when I step Going to Visual Studio Code, thousands of shared utility libraries available made me quickly leave the IDE Atom. That’s what I’ve seen with success.
For developers who know a lot about stack development, they can easily make a hammer, unfortunately AEC Engineers are not those people, they don’t have too much programming knowledge to build a platform with full stacks available, they need a hammer to quickly finish the nailing job is enough.
I hope someone will add impact here. And my one caveat is allowing users to moderate the quality when it’s published, which I’ve seen the Apple Store do very well, not like Android.

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