[ve-dev] Launch Configurations for Proxy remote VM's.

[Rich Kulp <richkulp@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Currently when we launch the remote
vm that we use for BeanInfo introspection and for hosting the live objects
from an editor we have a hard-coded configuration. We want to change this
so that the configuration can be modified by users. This is sometimes necessary
because the standard configuration is not sufficient. One hope is that
in the future, maybe we can launch the simulator for a PDA or something,
and those probably won't launch as a standard vm.

To get around this we want to be able
to supply a configuration for a project and/or a particular class from
the java visual editor. (Maybe for a particular class is overkill because
if a class being opened in the editor requires a different configuration
then for the project there could be problems with the introspection since
the introspection is done on a separate vm, and that one would use the
project's configuration and not the class' configuration).

We want it to be a different launch
configuration type and category so that these configurations don't show
up on the standard debug/run launch menus. That is because they aren't
to be used directly from the standard launch. Now the question then is
how do we make these available for creation and modification. One way would
be to add another run button on the toolbar (like the standard debug, run,
and run external tool buttons). We could do this, but it could clutter
the toolbar. Do we want to do this, or just make it available from the
context menu on a Java project?

The actual content of this configuration
will be dictated by the needs of the proxy plugin. So my basic questions
for the group are:

1. Should we put it on the toolbar or should we put it on the context menu for a project?
   The advantage of the context menu for a project is then it can be specific for the project and we can control it and not have more than one. If on the toolbar they can create as many as they wish for a project, making it harder to decide which to use. We would have to pop up each time asking which one to use, or we would have to have another menu saying use this one and not that one from now on until this selection is changed.
   
   The advantage of the toolbar is that it is a familiar paradigm.
   
   As an example, Ant launch configurations have the ability to launch directly from the external tools launcher (here you select the launch to use), or you can launch it from a context menu on the ant file itself in the navigator. In that case if there is more than one for that file it pops up a selection dialog to ask which one to use. So that would be a similar paradigm to what we would need to use if we put in on the toolbar.
   
2. Should we only have it available on project level at the current time, and not put it at the file level too until we figure out if we really want that much flexibility?

Any other questions, comments?

Thanks,
Rich Kulp