The new API¶
This document will try to give an explanation of why Spyder 5 incurred in a major refactoring of the codebase and redefinition of its plugin API.
The guiding principles¶
A. Loosely copupled components¶
Spyder should be provide a set of loosely coupled components with a clear hierarchy and dependency instead from a tightly coupled monolith. This means that some plugins have REQUIRED dependencies that must be present for the plugin to be able to be loaded, and there are OPTIONAL dependencies, that will not prevent the plugin from starting and working with other plugins.
B. Same workflow for internal and external plugins¶
Spyder should be written in the same way any external developer would, when extending or creating a third party Spyder Plugin. This way anyone developing external plugins can help the core codebase since it will look and feel esencially the same.
C. Simple and clear API¶
Spyder should provide 1 way and 1 way only for handling plugins, that means that even if plugins are providing very different functionality, the basic principles for creating, registering, setting up, loading, closing and accessing the configuration system should be the same for all.
D. Simple tooling¶
Spyder should provide enough tools, mixins and facilities for internal and external developers as to reduce the amount of work needed to create and extend a plugin and reduce the need for duplicating code in different places of the codebase.
4.x dependency graph¶
Red lines: represent hard dependencies, if the plugin is not available Spyder fails to start.
Purple lines: represent circular dependencies, plugins that depend on each other.
Green nodes: represent pseudo plugins, using special cases handling.
Blue nodes: represent a diferent type of plugin, not following the API.
Black nodes: Current plugins.
5.x dependency graph¶
Red lines: represent hard dependencies, if the plugin is not available the plugin will not load (but spyder can start).
Purple lines: There are no circular dependencies.
Green nodes: represent NEW plugins, which come from the pseudo plugins or splitting functionality living in the mainwindow.
Blue dashed lines: represent optional dependencies. Some functionality of the loaded plugin will not be available, but Spyder still starts.
Issues solved so far¶
Move the collections explorer out from the variable explorer and into the global
spyder.widgets.collectionseditormodule. See #12726.Migrate the Internal Console to use the new API. See #12438.