Package-level Javadoc
Author: Martin Oberhuber (Wind River)

Application programming interface for the RSE Base Shell and Terminal Services.

## Package Specification

The RSE Terminal Services packages provides interfaces and basic utility classes for shell or terminal connections. The classes in this package are especially designed to be extendable by means of the Decorator pattern as well as the Adapter pattern:

- `IBaseShell` is the basic interface for communicating with a (potentially remote) process through a channel supporting Streams. The Interface is modeled after the `java.lang.Process` class, but provides some nice enhancements such as a timeout for the `waitFor()` method, as well as an `isActive()` method.
- `ITerminalShell` extends IBaseShell, adding methods specific to the presentation of the data transferred from the (remote) process: it provides for getDefaultEncoding(), getPtyType(), isLocalEcho() as well as setTerminalSize() methods.
- `AbstractTerminalShell` is an abstract base class that implementers of ITerminalShell must extend. It provides default implementations of all methods where possible, and ensures that future evolving of the ITerminalShell interface can be done without breaking binary compatibility with extenders implementing it.
- `BaseShellDecorator` and `TerminalShellDecorator` abstract base classes should be used when clients want to add functionality by decorating an existing IBaseShell or ITerminalShell object they have. Again, extending these not only saves the extender typing default delegation methods, but also ensures that they remain binary compatible in case the interfaces evolve.
- `ITerminalService` is the RSE Service Interface, and currently only provides one factory method `launchTerminal()` for creating a new Terminal Connection. `AbstractTerminalService` must be used as base class by extenders who wish to implement the ITerminalService, in order to ensure binary compatibility in case the interface evolves - even though the AbstractTerminalService is currently empty.

The classes and interfaces in this package are designed to have only minimal dependency into Eclipse core APIs, such that Services can eventually be re-used in environments outside Eclipse. Especially `IBaseShell` and `BaseShellDecorator` are usable in any environment, provided that mock objects are provided for Eclipse IAdaptable and PlatformObject.