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I spent months fighting VS Code webviews, so I built an open source universal extension protocol

DEV Community·Mohamed Ibrahim·6 months ago
#OCvL56DC
#showdev#devtools#opensource#webdev#extension
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Hey Folks,

This project started because I simply wanted to build a new IDE to fix my own workflow bottlenecks. But I immediately hit a brick wall trying to build the tooling for it. I spent months, days, and nights trying to hack and fix VS Code extension webviews just to get a decent UI to render.

I realized I was fighting a 33 year old architectural problem: extension vendor lock in. If you want your dev tool to reach people today, you have to write Electron/TypeScript for VS Code/Cursor, and Kotlin/JVM for JetBrains.

So I stopped building the IDE, and I built the fix instead.

Meet OXP (Open eXtensions Protocol).

OXP is an open source universal standard that lets you write your extension once in React/WASM and run it natively across every major editor.

How I fixed the Webview problem:

This isn't a slow iframe hack. OXP uses a secure WebAssembly sandbox and a zero-latency IPC bridge.…

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