Description Darin Wright 2007-10-04 11:44:30 EDT

Currently, the org.eclipse.jdt.launching.vmInstalls extension point is used to contribute VMs that conform to the IVMInstallType/IVMInstall API. This means that VMs have to be able to be created/validated with an install location.

In 3.4, we've added a new extension point (vmInstallPages), allowing a custom UI to create/edit a VM type. JDT contributes a VM page for "*.ee" vms - vms created from execution environment description files. This VM has a custom API for creation (since they are not created on an install location, but a definition file).

We've modified platform code to allow an "ee" VM to be contributed with the existing 'vmInstalls' extension. However, if a (non-JDT) client were to contribute a custom VM type and VM page they would not have the same ability to hack the JDT code for VM creation via the 'vmInstalls' extension point.

We could allow for a VM factory to be contributed, to create VMs from configuration elements, for a given vm type. As well, we'd need to allow for arbitrary attributes (key/values) to be specified on vmInstall extensions (so for example, an "eeFile" attribute could be specified).