Description Willian Mitsuda 2007-01-18 11:14:34 EST

I'm not sure on what category this bug belongs to, but anyway I'll post it first on Callisto/cross-project-issues for discussion (since this is a inter-project issue). Feel free to move it to the appropriate place.

On my Eclipse 3.2.1 installation I have many plugins installed. Some of them are Eclipse.org hosted plugins and some of them are third-party plugins.

The point is: many of them offer some kind of tooling for existing workspace projects, but it is necessary to add the appropriate nature/builder to it work.

Often, the approach the tools follow is to add some action on project's context menu, like "Convert to XYZ project", or "Add XYZ nature".

This is not a scalable approach, since this causes a bloated context menu as more plugins are installed.

The attached screenshot shows a context menu for a project on my workspace.

The following actions are from Eclipse.org projects:

- MTJ -> Convert to MTJ project - this is from Mobile Tools for Java.
- Java Persistence -> Add Java Persistence - this is from Dali/JPA (now a Webtools subproject).
- AspectJ Tools -> Convert to AspectJ project - this is from AJDT.

The following actions are from third-party plugins, but once there is no standard recomendation, apparently they just follow the Eclipse.org "pattern" ;)

- Add Spring Project Nature - this is from Spring IDE.
- GWT Tools -> Add GWT Tooling Support - this is from GWT (Google Web Toolkit) plugin.
- J2ME -> Convert to J2ME Midlet Suite - this is from EclipseME.

I wonder what can be a good solution for this. Perhaps a submenu where other tools can add their own "Convert to..." actions or some extension point where tools can contribute conversion methods + some tooling from platform/ui.