# Using the Remote System Explorer API

In addition to all the programming API provided by Eclipse, the Remote System Explorer itself comes with numerous classes and interfaces that may be of value to programmers extending the RSE. Typically, these are used in conjunction with the extension points defined by the RSE.

The API set supplied by the RSE can be roughly partitioned into three areas:

1. User interface support, to make it easier to author plug-ins that extend or use the RSE.
2. Remote resources support, to enable access to remote resources via predefined subsystems.
3. Model support, to enable traversal of the RSE model, to access connections, subsystem factories, subsystems, filters, and so on.

This guide will introduce the capabilities of the API, leaving the programming details to the reference section.

## Provisional API

Although RSE API has been reviewed and proven useful in earlier proprietary versions, we want to give the Open Source Communitiy a chance to provide more public feedback and help further improving the APIs. Therefore,

As of TM / RSE 2.0, all API is considered provisional.

This means, that we reserve the right to change any API after TM / RSE 2.0 in a not backward compatible way. We will make every sensible effort to keep at least Source API Compatibility intact, but in cases where this would lead to unnecessary code bloat we will go with API breakage. All such API changes will be voted on by committers on the dsdp-tm-dev developer mailing list, and documented in a migration guide for future releases. We expect that with Community Feedback, we'll reach a stable, hardened API for TM 3.0. Please give your feedback on Eclipse Bugzilla under category DSDP, Product Target Management.