The problem Spheron Explorer solves

The problem that this extension solves is the need for a streamlined and integrated way to manage Spheron deployments within the VS Code environment. By providing a custom view in the Activity Bar called "Spheron Explorer", the extension allows developers to easily view and manage their Spheron deployments without having to switch between different tools or interfaces.
The custom view displays a list of Spheron deployments, along with their status and other information. It also provides commands for adding an API key and deploying files to the platform.

Challenges we ran into

VS Code Development

While the basic Idea was to use existing Spheron services like its cli and APIs to fetch information and execute tasks, it proved really challenging to figure out how to actually integrate it with VS Code. It took us a long time to figure out how to use VSCode's APIs to create views and commands which can perform the tasks we needed.
I was able to overcome it by goint through the extensive documentation and resources available for VS Code extension development, as well as by experimenting with different approaches and techniques until I found the best solution for our needs. While it took many iterations to figure out what was working and what not, we were finally able to achieve the task.

Incorect Documentation

One problem that we realised somewhat late was that some of the docs of spheron/cli was wrong and did not provide all the needed parameters to trigger certain funcions which made some functionalities inoperable 😔.