The Art of Building Your First Plugin System

Issue #19 —Creating your own plugins

Hey everyone,

Welcome to the 19th edition of Coffee Bytes (formerly known as Programming Bytes), a daily digest by Better Programming.

In this issue, we’ve selected a few standout posts to help you understand the process of building plugin systems. For starters, plugins or add-ons, or extensions are a piece of software that brings new features and provides much-needed customisability to your applications.

• Build a Custom IntelliJ Code Inspection Plugin — by Ruben Quadros — Ever miss annotating data class params only to get a JSON parsing error? As an Android developer, I’ve been there and done that. Ruben shares an approach without going the lint checks way. He’s created an IntelliJ plugin that inspects Kotlin data classes and warns you of missing SerializedName annotations — in real-time!
• How to Create Your Own Sublime Text Plugin — by Yuchen Z. —Want to build a logger that logs API requests with JSON-like responses? Yuchen builds a custom log formatter for Sublime Text using Python.
• Writing Flutter plugin package by Kristian Tuusjarvi — Kristian couldn’t find a decent Flutter package for extracting texts from PDF. So, he created his own plugin. Check out this story to know the anatomy of a Flutter package, and how to create and publish one.
• Build a Fastlane Plugin for Flutter Version Management From Scratch — by Tianhao Zhou — Back in the day, Fastlane’s support for Flutter versioning wasn’t there. Guess what? Tianhao built a Flutter versioning management plugin for Fastlane to get rid of manual version changes. Read his tutorial for the complete step-by-step implementation.
• A Step-By-Step Guide to Building Your First VueJS Plugin — by Matt Maribojoc — Creating your own plugin can seem like a daunting task, but it doesn’t have to be. Matt explores ways, tools, and techniques to create simple as well as advanced Vue.js plugins.
• How to Design Software — Plugin Systems — by Joseph Gefroh — Joseph’s piece digs deep into the design-building process of plugin systems. He’s also implemented a chatbot built using plugins.
• Create Android Studio plugin to toggle “Show layout bounds” — by Paulina Sadowska — There are so many Android Studio plugins, but ever wanted to create one for your specific needs? Paulina guides us in creating a simple Android Studio plugin that interacts with connected devices and toggles one of the developer options that we all rarely use.

That wraps up this edition. Thanks for reading.

Until your next coffee,

Anupam and the Better Programming team.