1) The AS should have some sort of API for launching our processes so tools that want a process have a clear contract instead of having to guess at what's relevant in our ever-changing scripts.

2) We want the main class in our process launch to be what's invoked by java -jar jboss-modules.jar. We don't want java -jar jboss-as-launcher.jar which does some stuff and then calls org.jboss.modules.Main.

3) JBoss Modules itself shouldn't have a lot of the stuff in it that's relevant to an AS launcher API, because many of those things are not relevant to JBoss Modules in a generic sense.

What we could do though is provide a launcher lib that isn't involved at all in our normal boot. Something that would only be used by tools that want to launch a separate, i.e. non-embedded, AS process.

So, some sort of stable configuration API and then a simple

java.lang.Process launch()

Basically, a utility that does the ProcessBuilder stuff that everybody is doing themselves now.

HOWEVER...

Eclipse-based tools like JBDS use Eclipse APIs for launch and would not use the above launch() method.

So, besides that launch method, look into adding some methods to give the necessary inputs to the Eclipse API be useful. So Eclipse-based tools don't ask it for the process but can still get a standard launch configuration.

I'd only want to do that if those methods would return something generally understandable, but a String or List<String> for classpath, List<String>s for vm/program args, some representation that "-jar jboss-modules.jar" is the way to get the main class – those all seem generic enough.

Any "which VM" stuff is consider out of scope; choosing the VM is the responsibility of the tool. Options that are not universally supported across VMs and are those a function of VM choice, like whether to use -server, are also out of scope.

Example of EAP 6.0 launch:

VM arguments:
-server -Xms64m -Xmx512m -XX:MaxPermSize=256m -Djava.net.preferIPv4Stack=true -Dorg.jboss.resolver.warning=true -Dsun.rmi.dgc.client.gcInterval=3600000 -Dsun.rmi.dgc.server.gcInterval=3600000 -Djboss.modules.system.pkgs=org.jboss.byteman -Djava.awt.headless=true "-Dorg.jboss.boot.log.file=/Users/max/products/runtimes/jboss-eap-6.0/standalone/log/boot.log" "-Dlogging.configuration=file:/Users/max/products/runtimes/jboss-eap-6.0/standalone/configuration/logging.properties" "-Djboss.home.dir=/Users/max/products/runtimes/jboss-eap-6.0"

Program argument:
-mp "/Users/max/products/runtimes/jboss-eap-6.0/modules" -jaxpmodule javax.xml.jaxp-provider org.jboss.as.standalone -b localhost --server-config=standalone.xml