ISky v1 and ISkyPro v2+ Plugins

ISkyPro uses versioned terminology for its two plugin systems:

• ISky v1 plugins (EPL / x86) are EPL DLL plugins compatible with the original ISky framework v1 ABI.
• ISkyPro v2+ plugins are available from ISkyPro 2.0 and use Plugin SDK v2, static manifests, and stdio-jsonrpc or HTTP transport.

The shorter names “v1 plugins” and “v2 plugins” are used below.

ISky v1 Plugins

ISky v1 plugins continue to use the plugin/ directory:

ISkyPro/
  plugin/
    ExamplePlugin.dll

Characteristics:

• Suitable for existing ISky / E-language DLL plugins.
• Run in the independent x86 isky.exe host.
• Message callbacks remain serialized for each v1 plugin, preserving v1 return-value interception semantics.
• The WebUI can scan, upload, enable, disable, restart, sort, open settings, and uninstall them.
• The v1 plugin ABI and message.dll compatibility layer remain available.

ISky v1 plugins are supported only by Windows packages. Linux x64 packages do not include isky.exe, message.dll, or the v1 plugin ABI compatibility layer.

ISkyPro v2+ Plugins

Local stdio v2 plugins use plugins-v2/:

ISkyPro/
  plugins-v2/
    top.example.echo/
      manifest.json
      plugin.py

Characteristics:

• Discovered through static manifest.json.
• Local stdio-jsonrpc is the recommended default transport.
• stdout may contain only JSON-RPC protocol frames. Ordinary logs must go to stderr or log.write.
• The plugin process is started, stopped, restarted, and monitored by Main.
• Supports typed + raw events, delayed replies through messageReference, permission declarations, and settings schema.
• The WebUI v2 plugins tab can install zip packages, show status, start, stop, restart, disable, uninstall, and open settings.

HTTP v2 plugins do not live under plugins-v2/ and are not uploaded as ZIP files. They run as independent web services, expose GET /iskypro/plugin/manifest and POST /iskypro/plugin/events/message, and are registered in WebUI by base URL. Their deployment environment owns the service lifecycle.

Which One to Use

• Existing ISky / EPL x86 DLL plugin: keep using the v1 plugin entry.
• New plugin: prefer the ISkyPro v2+ plugin system.
• Linux, Python / Node.js / Go, or cross-platform plugin: use the v2 plugin path.
• v1 interception-chain semantics: use a v1 plugin, or explicitly design command / filter behavior in a v2 plugin.