Oracle VM VirtualBox comes with comprehensive support for third-party developers. The so-called Main API of Oracle VM VirtualBox exposes the entire feature set of the virtualization engine. It is completely documented and available to anyone who wishes to control Oracle VM VirtualBox programmatically.

The Main API is made available to C++ clients through COM on Windows hosts or XPCOM on other hosts. Bridges also exist for SOAP, Java and Python.

All programming information such as documentation, reference information, header and other interface files, as well as samples have been split out to a separate Software Development Kit (SDK). The SDK is available for download from http://www.virtualbox.org. In particular, the SDK comes with a Programming Guide and Reference manual in PDF format. This manual contains, among other things, the information that was previously in this chapter of the User Manual.