Plug-in Proxy Overview

Plug-in Proxy Overview — Overview of Gwyddion plug-ins and the plugin-proxy module

Overview

Plug-ins are external programs that can be executed by Gwyddion to either perform some operation on the data or to read or write data in a third-party file format.

The capability to use plug-ins is not a built-in Gwyddion feature, instead it is provided a by a smart module called plug-in proxy. With the small exception there is a dedicated directory for plug-ins defined directly in Gwyddion, the plug-in proxy module is in no way privileged or otherwise special. It can be removed or there can be added other plug-in proxies and happily coexist with the current one.

When the plug-in proxy module registeres self, it scans the plug-in directories, requests information from the plug-ins it finds and passes the information as its own features. Likewise when it is run to process some data it executes the appropriate plug-in to process it and passes the result back to Gwyddion. All plug-in features thus look as plug-in proxy features to Gwyddion, as you can see yourself in the Module Browser.

FIXME: More to be said.