Plugin Hosting Mechanism Replaced in External Processes

In order to ensure better isolation of plugins from libraries that are not part of the API, as well as to expand functionality, plugin execution will be performed using a new host process Resto.Front.Api.Host.exe (instead of Resto.CashServer.OutOfProcHost.exe). For plugins under V2 and V3, backward compatibility has been implemented, and starting from V4, a number of changes are introduced.

Key changes:

• logging has become part of the API (no longer should the library log4net installed for SyrveFront be used directly or through Resto.Framework);
• message queue processing has been disabled (if a plugin wants to display windows, it must create a UI thread and run a Dispatcher or another message processing loop implementation itself);
• starting from V4, access to API services can be obtained from anywhere in the plugin code by referring to the static members of the PluginContext class (there is no longer a need to pass service references throughout the code);
• starting from V4, the IFrontPlugin interface does not contain the Init method (the plugin class must still have a public constructor without arguments, where all initialization should be performed);
• the requirement to inherit the plugin class from MarshalByRefObject has been removed;
• there is now the possibility of convenient debugging of the plugin without restarting the SyrveFront application;
• some bugs have been fixed (for example, it is now possible to split the configuration file into several parts).