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/*******************************************************************************
 * Copyright (c) 2005, 2012 IBM Corporation and others.
 * All rights reserved. This program and the accompanying materials
 * are made available under the terms of the Eclipse Public License v1.0
 * which accompanies this distribution, and is available at
 * http://www.eclipse.org/legal/epl-v10.html
 *
 * 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;
}