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Introducing Cesium Plugins

Patrick Cozzi

Today we are rolling out Cesium plugins, which are libraries that integrate with Cesium and add functionality. The initial set of plugins include cesium-leap, by Aviture, which adds navigation using the Leap Motion Controller.

Plugins have several benefits:

  • Plugins keep core Cesium as lean as possible, e.g., by avoiding large third-party dependencies in Cesium for non-essential features.
  • An ecosystem of plugins will provide app developers with new functionality, perhaps even niche features for vertical markets that we wouldn't usually include in core Cesium.
  • Plugin developers have full ownership of their plugin and its development process. To have some consistency, plugins just need to follow three simple guidelines. For those interested in contributing to the Cesium community, this provides an even lower barrier-to-entry than contributing to core Cesium (which we also encourage, of course). We hope that the plugin ecosystem will increase Cesium community contributions and also highlight contributor organizations and individuals.

To get started using plugins in your Cesium app, check out the plugins list. If you create a plugin, we'd like to include it in the list; just fork the cesium-plugins-list repo and open a pull request. For even more background, see the forum discussion.