Web UI Plugins

[tutman96]

As an extension to #10 there was several conversations about plugins having the ability to extend the web UI with custom components. Starting a separate discussion because the technology and interface is quite different from the direction the plugin system is heading now.

[tutman96]

I've discovered that the Vite community actually has a system for doing "micro-frontend" type setups: https://github.com/originjs/vite-plugin-federation

This is actually a pretty neat idea and would allow the following:

• JetKVM defines many different component interfaces for various locations (slots) within the web UI: plugin configuration, action bar buttons, even settings tab items (might conflict with plugin configuration) or custom on-screen keyboard buttons
• The plugin defines in its manifest.json components that it want's to place in each of these slots as a relative path to the remoteEntry.js file
• When the Web UI loads, it queries the plugin system for all of the plugin web ui components, and uses virtual:__federation__ to dynamically load them into the frontend through JSONRPC
• Each "slot" will have an interface, but most slots should provide access to things like the system RPC and possibly even an interface directly to its own plugin to make RPC calls to.
• We wouldn't want to expose RPC to other plugins as that would introduce coupling, and should restrict the system RPC methods available to plugins to prevent things like adding SSH keys or changing passwords. Possibly this is where a plugin's "permissions" come more into play

Each plugin could then write their own react components, which can be dynamically loaded/unloaded from the web UI. There will be challenges when it comes to styling the components, as Tailwind is dynamically built based on usage, but either we can build standardized components, or we can require that UI plugins bake their own styling.

I'm also thinking that plugins can optionally provide a bin executable as to provide a mechanism for frontend-only plugins.