Kimberly Horne recently posted an interesting message on the equinox-dev list ; there's some experimental transformations that can be used to select specific views or actions from an existing plugin, but without needing to incorporate everything.

She'd posted a patch earlier on in the year , but since being granted committer status on the Equinox project, some of the initial code has made its way in an experimental way. You can get a feel for what is possible at the Product Customisation page on the Eclipse Wiki site.

There's a number of cool things that can be done here; if you've got a plugin, you can dynamically select which sets of views are present or shown, even if the plugin can contain all the views. It makes it easier to re-use core bundles such as the JDT UI bundle, but without adding unneeded functionality. Or, you could use this to provide a free or basic model, and then allow extended functionality with a registered license code or other activation (e.g. JAAS credentials).

Whilst you can do this manually at the moment by hand-editing the plugin.xml prior to deployment, this is a solution which requires no changes to existing bundles at run-time.

Even more impressively, as well as having XSLT to perform transformations, you can also use a SED transformer, which uses sed/vi type replacements (and therefore also regular expressions)if you're not comfortable with XSLT.

And it doesn't cost extra start-up time if you don't use it, since it's a hook that doesn't have to do any work or even be present in the normal case. How cool is that?

Kim's looking for feedback on the functionality, and this is going to be a very important part of Eclipse RCP apps when it goes live. Here's hoping there will be a long talk on it at EclipseCon next year If you've got any feedback, you can send them via the equinox-dev mailing list, or reply here and I'll forward any responses on to Kim.

Alex.