The ui project for the JSR-88 plugin plug-in consists of three main parts.

• A preference page to group and manage deployment-related configuration pieces.

• A CreateConfiguration dialog (and action) to turn a generic j2ee object into a vendor-specific one.

• A deploy action to deploy properly configured projects with some configuration file

Parts of this page refer to The Spec, as well as my summary of it.

The Preference Page

The preference page manages a collection of targets, a collection of vendor-provided jar files with classes relevant to deployment, as well as associations between the two. 

The Pieces Tab

The first tab of the preference page is titled pieces, and contains the list of jar files, of targets, and of "configuration files". These configuration files are created by taking a j2ee deployable file (.war, etc), and filling in the information requested by the vendor-provided classes for the application server you intend to deploy to.

The first thing that needs to be done here is to add vendor-provided .jar files to the list of Vendor Jar Files. When adding one, the plug-in will check that the .jar file's manifest defines a J2EE-DeploymentFactory-Implementation-Class key. If that key is not defined, this is not a valid vendor-supplied jar file and the addition will be rejected.

Creating the configuration files is not able to be done in the preferences tab. This is done via an action by right-clicking on a .war file you'd like to deploy and generating the configuration file. The information is viewable here, though, for convenience. Each configuration file is specific to some vendor .jar file (as each vendor may ask for different information to proceed). Therefore, this list will be updated each time a vendor-specific .jar file is selected.

For example, if the jboss-deployment.jar is selected in the top list, the middle list will update itself with all configurations that were created using the jboss vendor-provided classes.

Below that is where you can define a target.  A target is named, has a url, and a username / pass.

The association tab

The second page of the preference page maps these configuration files to some resource you intend to deploy. 

The association's tab associates a vendor jar file, a target, and a configuration together under one named association. Later on, when you try to deploy a .war file by right-clicking on it and selecting deploy, if the file is already mapped to one of these associations, the plug-in will attempt to deploy the .war using the vendor jar's classes, the saved configuration, and the target. If the .war is NOT linked to an associatiuon, a dialog box will allow you to do so.