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Developer documentation

The typical operation of a plugin/extension is:

Initial start-up

  1. Open an in-editor/in-IDE web browser if possible. Use this to report status and errors during the following steps. Otherwise, fall back to in-editor/IDE notifications.
  2. Use this reporter to tell the user that the CodeChat System is starting.
  3. Run the CodeChat Server with the start subcommand and wait for it to finish. If the return was 0, the server is running. Otherwise, a non-zero return value indicates an error; stop here, reporting stdout and stderr to the user.
  4. Open a connection to the server. If the connection fails, stop here and report the error.
  5. Invoke get_client; send the returned HTML/URL to the web browser.

Main loop

At this point, the CodeChat System is up and running. Now, the system should:

  • Watch for IDE events, then send render requests to the server.
  • Respond to and report connection errors.
  • Respond to closing of the extension or the CodeChat Client web browser window.

Modules

A typical plugin/extension has these modules:

  • A thrift_connection: Thrift network connection to the server, along with a thrift_client created from that connection.
  • A set of functions/methods to invoke CodeChat editor/IDE services <editor_services> along with a codechat_client_id used to communicate with the CodeChat Client.
  • A web browser (optional; can be an external browser instead) hosting the CodeChat Client.
  • A system to make render requests based on IDE activity (edits, switching windows, etc.)

The extension GUI should allow restarting the server, which should require closing/restarting the Thrift connection and the web browser's contents. Closing the extension should cause all resources to be freed, so that restarting it would then restart the entire system.

Logging

To help track down bugs, each side of a network connection needs to provide logging:

  • The server logs all requests from the IDE, web server activity, and CodeChat Client activity.
  • The CodeChat Client emits console.log info.
  • Each extension should provide IDE-specific logging capabilities.