Extension Catalog for Isolated Process Activation
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Solution Overview
Problem
Designing applications that can be extended poses challenges such as describing extension points, discovering, and activating extensions, while also dealing with security and performance issues, including potential termination or degradation of extensions impacting the original application, and data sharing affecting security.
Innovation Solution
The operating system maintains an extension catalog that stores data about extensions and their supported contracts, allowing for querying and selecting extensions to activate them as independent processes, enabling communication between applications and extensions according to the supported contracts, with mechanisms for registration, installation, and user interface-driven selection.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Reliability
If extensions are activated as independent processes, then reliability is improved by isolating failures, but device complexity increases due to process management overhead
Solution Approach 1:
The system segments the extension execution into separate independent processes, isolating each extension from the main application and other extensions. This segmentation allows failures in one extension to be contained and does not propagate to the main application or other extensions, thereby improving reliability while the operating system manages the complexity of process isolation.
2Adaptability or versatility
If extensions are queried and selected from a catalog, then adaptability is improved by enabling dynamic selection, but loss of information increases due to additional configuration steps
Solution Approach 1:
The system performs preliminary actions by maintaining a catalog of extensions with their contracts pre-defined and registered. When an application needs an extension, the system queries this pre-prepared catalog rather than requiring ad-hoc configuration, thereby enabling flexible dynamic selection while minimizing information loss through pre-established extension contracts.
3Ease of operation
If extensions communicate with applications through contracts, then ease of operation is improved by standardizing interfaces, but device complexity increases due to contract validation requirements
Solution Approach 1:
The system implements a universal contract mechanism that serves multiple functions: it defines the interface between extensions and applications, validates compatibility, and manages the registration and querying processes. This single contract-based approach simplifies extension integration across different applications while the operating system handles the complexity of validation and enforcement.
Data Source
AI summary
The operating system of a computer maintains an extension catalog that stores data relating extensions with information about the contracts the extensions support. Extensions are registered in this catalog according to the contract they implement. The extension catalog can be queried to identify extensions that support a given contract. An extension can be selected from among the results from a query, and the selected extension can be activated. When activated, the extension is set up by the operating system as an independent process from, and with context from, the application for which it is an extension. Information about the extension is provided to the application to enable the extension and the application to communicate according to the supported contract.