The Oracle JDeveloper site has a Quick Tour viewlet that demonstrates creating a new project -- it is about 2/3 of the way through the viewlet but the whole thing is worth watching. When creating a new project, they allow the user to select from a drop down of Application Templates. This drop down allows me to select things like No Template [All Technologies], Web Application [JSP, Struts, EJB], Web Application [JSP, EJB], Java Application [Java, Swing], etc. The user is also able to create custom templates.

With the recent discussions on being able to customize the JSP templates, I was thinking that it would be nice to create Application Templates that allow me to define what are all of the technologies, artifacts, and templates that I want associated with a project out of the box. I think this would make it easier for developers to take advantage of ME features than adding capabilities to a project. Although this feature still needs to exist.

Andy,
What do the templates define? Libraries automatically dropped in? xml config files? default file types? Does this limit what you actually see in the "New File" dialogs and the such, or are these just "help you get started quick" type of templates?

Yes... All of the things you just mentioned. :D

If I have a project which I know I will need Hibernate, Spring, Struts, JSP, Tomcat, I want to be able to create a project that has those features available to me at project creation. My source folders, classpath, code generation templates, CSS, L&F, web folders, build files, etc. are all set up for me. Menus are customized based on current feature sets. If I add/remove capabilities, the menus and such are tweaked as needed.

Ideally the Application Templates would be exportable so that other ME users could take advantage of them. Maybe even make them something that could be installed via the update manager.

exactly!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Jason,

This enhancement definitely has internal attention. We realize that incrementally "Add xxx Capability..." is cumbersome and is most friendly when accomplished during project creation time. We are currently putting into place a general templating mechanism that will eventually allow users to create custom templates. For now we are in crawl before walk mode. Look for more discussion on this topic at a later time as we a better positioned to surface the functionality.

I asked later last year about a similiar item, in the following thread. Maybe I'm misunderstanding the question - but I think to start with something simple like below (assuming it's not implemented already) would alleviate a lot of what people are asking for.

http://www.myeclipseide.com/index.php?name=PNphpBB2&file=viewtopic&t=496