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/*******************************************************************************
* Copyright (c) 2005, 2012 IBM Corporation and others.
*
* This program and the accompanying materials
* are made available under the terms of the Eclipse Public License 2.0
* which accompanies this distribution, and is available at
* https://www.eclipse.org/legal/epl-2.0/
*
* SPDX-License-Identifier: EPL-2.0
*
* Contributors:
* IBM Corporation - initial API and implementation
*******************************************************************************/
package org.eclipse.core.runtime;
/**
* This interface allows extension providers to control how the instances provided to extension-points are being created
* by referring to the factory instead of referring to a class. For example, the following extension to the preference page
* extension-point uses a factory called <code>PreferencePageFactory</code>.
* <code><pre>
* &lt;extension point="org.eclipse.ui.preferencePages"&gt;
* &lt;page name="..." class="org.eclipse.update.ui.PreferencePageFactory:org.eclipse.update.ui.preferences.MainPreferencePage"&gt;
* &lt;/page&gt;
* &lt;/extension&gt;
* </pre>
* </code>
*
* <p>
* Effectively, factories give full control over the create executable extension process.
* </p><p>
* The factories are responsible for handling the case where the concrete instance implement {@link IExecutableExtension}.
* </p><p>
* Given that factories are instantiated as executable extensions, they must provide a 0-argument public constructor.
* Like any other executable extension, they can configured by implementing {@link org.eclipse.core.runtime.IExecutableExtension} interface.
* </p><p>
* This interface can be used without OSGi running.
* </p>
* @see org.eclipse.core.runtime.IConfigurationElement
*/
public interface IExecutableExtensionFactory {
/**
* Creates and returns a new instance.
*
* @exception CoreException if an instance of the executable extension
* could not be created for any reason
*/
Object create() throws CoreException;
}