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PLUGINS

Introduction

This document describes the components of the lab and experiment architecture that can be redesigned as independent systems and included in the the lab architecture

Plugin Arcitecture

The plugin architecture is based on the idea of separating the core application from additional features in order to achieve the following:

Ease of Extension
When the application is modelled as a composition of several features put together as independent plugins, it becomes easy to add/remove/modify the features as and when needed.
Plugins can be indenpendently developed and maintained
Plugins can be devloped by as separate projects that can be simply imported and used by the core system.

There are two main components in a plugin based system: The Core and Extensions.

Core

The core is the basic application. This core is kept as simple as possible and only conatains business logic. All the features are separated into plugins.

In case of the lab build process, the core of the application consists of the lab and experiment related data (lab name, broad area, list of experiments etc.) and logic (processing pipeline, url schemes, configurations etc.).

Extensions/Plugins

Any feature that is not related to the application domain, can be separated as a plugin. In the Lab and Experiment build processes the following features can be separated as plugins.

  • Page
  • Content Rendering
  • Content Dependency Validation
  • Analytics
  • Feedback
  • Discussion Forum
  • Ratings
  • Component Units like code assessment

Analytics

Analytics feature tracks the usage of lab and experiment webpages. This feature is not unique to the Virtual Labs. It is widely used by websites to measure the activities of visiting users. As a result there are several tools available for performing website analytics. Currently we at Virtual Labs use Google Analytics, but it is not the only option avaiable.

Additionally, there are scenarios where analytics is not needed. For example, while developing and testing an experiment/lab, analytics is not required. So, we need the ability to enable/disable analytics.

The details of analytics are provided in this document.

As of now, the process to add analytics to any page is included in the page building process which in turn depends of the kind of page (is it a lab page or an experiment page).

The first step towards creating a plugin for analytics requires separating the page building process from the core.

References

https://medium.com/omarelgabrys-blog/plug-in-architecture-dec207291800