Hi all In relation to pact plugins, we at OutSystems are trying to check if we can write a plugin to do contract testing that use NATS as the delivery system of messages between systems to test. That is the services communicate via message exchange with NATS (https://nats.io/) (that messages are json payload to a specific topic). That made us checking the plugins documentation and examples and some questions were raised: • Can we currently do a plugin that would connect to Nats like a client and subscribe to topic to either receive or publish messages, and verify the content of those messages (like Grpc or protobuf or kafka) • Can we use .Net for creating the plugin? If not, since pact-net is a wrapper for the Rust common engine, do we need to use Rust. Or can we use Kotlin? • Does pact-net already support plugin usage like pact-rust or pact-jvm? And if not, when can we expect that to happen, if at all? • How does contract visualization occur on the pactflow site? • What kind of support can we expect from Pactflow/Smartbear team for this endeavor?

Hi @Fábio Rodrigues I'll try answer all the questions: • Can we currently do a plugin that would connect to Nats like a client and subscribe to topic to either receive or publish messages, and verify the content of those messages (like Grpc or protobuf or kafka) This is what the plugin framework was designed to do. We tried to make it as generic as possible to support all the different use cases that we are aware of. However, the general strategy we are aiming for is to emulate systems like Nats. I.e., with Grpc the plugin provides a mock server to use, and with Kafka we don't actually connect to a real Kafka topic during the tests. • Can we use .Net for creating the plugin? If not, since pact-net is a wrapper for the Rust common engine, do we need to use Rust. Or can we use Kotlin? Currently plugin support is available with Pact-JVM, Pact-Rust and Pact-Go, so you will need to write the tests in a language supported by one of those frameworks. So Rust or Kotlin will work. • Does pact-net already support plugin usage like pact-rust or pact-jvm? And if not, when can we expect that to happen, if at all? I think Pact-JS is the next target, and the support for it is in development. Once that is released, Pact-Net will probably be the next framework to target. I would imagine that work on that will start around middle of 2023. • How does contract visualization occur on the pactflow site? Pactflow does not currently support the plugin and V4 Pact formats, so will try render it in a very basic manor. Plugin support was scheduled to begin Q1 2023, so that work should kick off shortly. • What kind of support can we expect from Pactflow/Smartbear team for this endeavor? Plugins is on the Pactflow feature roadmap, so new features for it are supported by the budget from Smartbear for Pactflow features. For maintenance and issues with Pact frameworks, Smartbear allows the engineering teams to spend up to about 20% of their budgets on OSS maintenance. So with those constraints, we will try to support any plugin work as it is important to us.