[jbosstools-dev] Extensibility of the JBT Project Examples code

[Brian Fitzpatrick]

Hi all...

I've been looking at reusing the Project Examples wizard that's available as part of JBT/JBDS and am wondering how we might be able to extend it to allow users to actually modify a sample project and use it as a template rather than just as-is. 

Though this would require some additional extension points and coding, I'm wondering if we could associate extra wizard pages with a particular example to allow customization. 

For example, I want to be able to take the webservice_proxy_basic example and offer the user the opportunity to change the WSDL that would be proxied and possibly at least template any required input/output transformation actions.

This diverges from the current paradigm though of taking a zip file that has an entire project in it and simply importing it into the workspace, then tweaking for any issues that arise that are related to environment-specific configuration.

Though I understand why we've gone with the import method, I'd rather try to provide the user with something that offers a bit more flexibility.

I suspect that my approach would require a separate wizard and extension framework for project templates with associated wizard pages. But this would require the coding for each project we wished to create in this way and not allow reuse of the existing quickstarts or the zipped up projects of the Project Examples approach.

Can anyone else see the utility of a new approach here or am I just trying to reinvent the wheel?

--Fitz

_______________________________
Brian Fitzpatrick (aka "Fitz")
Senior Software Engineer, SOA-P
JBoss by Red Hat