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Comment by forthefuture | Hacker News Reader

I can't tell you how happy I'd be if someone made a network of applications you could download and install in under a second that ran in any other language.

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Is there a way to extend a running javascript app without restart. Say I have a Single Page APP (built on React if that matters) and I want to allow third party developers to add Components / modules/ themes/ plugins to a registry. I want to be able to allow end users to choose third party plugins from the registry to extend the capabilities of the SPA.

Is this possible? If so, is there any guidance on how to achieve this?

Thanks

Sure it's possible. As an example, Odoo is a full Python webapp "platform", with a core upon which the user can choose and load plugins to add features (from a simple contact list to a full-blown ERP/CRM/accouting/CMS) and extensions to those features.

On the frontend side, when you install a module, it loads the .js file (using a regular <script> tag) which contains a single function. The Odoo core passes its main JS object (the base of the core API) to that function, which then initializes the whole module and uses the Odoo API to configure stuff, setup hooks, etc.

There's no security, though: by design, a module is trusted and can do anything on the platform. I'm not sure if and how one could contain them.

(Disclaimer: I'm a developer working for an Odoo partner, we write modules and host it as a SaaS.)

I don't speak Python, but on the client modules could run in web workers.

I'm pretty much solo on this, but I'm trying to build something along those lines.[1][2]

[1]: https://www.infinite-automata.com/

[2]: https://gitlab.com/infinite-automata/

Ditto, because most things I use online load in the >10 second range and don't "install" in any meaningful sense of the word.

So, RDP/VNC to a server running a full desktop GUI application with folder redirection to access local files?

ran in any other language

When you say "language" here, are you referring to the web languages (HTML, JS)?

I think they're referring to any non-web language, e.g. if I could host and distribute C apps with the ease of the web. (Getting end-users to actually run and use a program with one click, rather than having to download a binary, run it separately, etc.)

Are you thinking of something along the lines of `ceylon run com.example.helloworld/1.0.0`? This command downloads the module if it's not locally available from the remote repository and then runs it to print "Hello, World!".

You mean like apt or chocalatey or any other package manager?

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