The current mechanism for specifying the SwitchYard version during project creation (and editing through properties) requires the user to specify the version without any hints. (There is a drop list that is populated from the user's local Maven repository, but that does not help if they have no SwitchYard artifacts.) A default is provided, but that is the just the latest community release, which makes things difficult for users of the product (the version may be slightly different).

By adding support for a SwitchYard runtime component, users can choose the version based on the version installed in the runtime. This simplifies things for the user (other than they have to configure a server/runtime) and allows us to support multiple runtime versions without having to modify the tooling every time a new runtime version is released.