how do plugins provide script functions?

[timobaumann]

I don't find an obvious way of adding a "semi-builtin" function to provide additional functionality from a plugin. Any hints? (not the groovy hint, please.)

[alexanderkoller]

I don't think this is possible, and it's not clear to me that we want this.

• What syntax would you use to address functions provided by plugins?
• It breaks the abstraction of a plugin as a thing that provides nodes to DialogOS and whose classnames are irrelevant to a DialogOS user.
• How would you protect against the unavailability of these functions if the plugin is not installed?

Any solution that I can think of seems quite brittle, and I'd be inclined to leave this to advanced users who use Groovy scripts and know what a classpath is.

[timobaumann]

• Syntax: the plugin just provides the FunctionDescriptor and the corresponding definition of the function. There's absolutely no need for classnames.
• I don't think a plugin only provides nodes. In fact, there might be things that should be controllable from the script language wrt. to the node types provided by the languages. Think modifying incremental speech synthesis as one example.
• Of course, the plugin needs to be there. But same holds true for the nodes.

I'm thinking there should be something similar to Node.registerNodeType for script functions that should become available in the language when the plugin is loaded. In fact, the present handling of the "DialogOS-Script-Functions" is beyond weird. I don't see how this would be britte.

I, for one, am a sort-of-advanced user who, lacking documentation on Groovy script, still uses the script language.

[akoehn]

lacking documentation on Groovy

https://groovy-lang.org :-)

[timobaumann]

plugins may now provide their own script functions by overriding Plugin#registerScriptFunctions() and returning ExecutableFunctionDescriptors that directly contain what's to be computed in eval(). An example of how a plugin might want to use this is given in 7240b67

[alexanderkoller]

Here is the documentation on Groovy nodes: https://github.com/dialogos-project/dialogos/wiki/Groovy-Functions