External Plugins

The superpower of the Engine is the ability to interact safely with external plugins.

Currently the Engine supports 2 communication channels:

• Iframe

• Websocket

The interface of these plugins is exacly the same as the other plugins.

Iframe

For the IframePlugin we need to specify the location where the plugin will be displayed, and the url which will be used as the source of the iframe.

The Engine can fetch the content of plugin hosted on IPFS or any other server accessible through HTTPS

const ethdoc = new IframePlugin({
  name: 'ethdoc',
  location: 'sidePanel',
  url: 'ipfs://QmQmK435v4io3cp6N9aWQHYmgLxpUejjC1RmZCbqL7MJaM'
})

Websocket

For the WebsocketPlugin you just need to specify the url as there is no UI to display.

This plugin is very useful for connecting to a local server like remixD, and an external API

const remixd = new WebsocketPlugin({
  name: 'remixd',
  url: 'wss://localhost:8000'
})

In the future, we’ll implement more communication connection like REST, GraphQL, JSON RPC, gRPC, …