JEP-161 questions

[Alan Bateman]

On 13/02/2013 17:56, Giorgis, Dan (Tridium) wrote:
> We currently use a headless J2SE 1.5 JRE in an embedded device.  A smaller footprint J2SE Java 8 profile is very attractive to us.  I think this will go a long ways to bridging the gap between J2ME capable devices and devices that are bigger, but not quite big enough to support a full blown J2SE JRE.
>
> I have a  couple questions regarding package selection for the profiles
>
> 1)  We make use of the JavaMail library in our embedded devices.  This requires JAF (javax.activation), which in turn requires java.awt.datatransfer.  Has any consideration been given to adding the java.awt.datatransfer package to compact3 profile?
>
> 2) We also use LDAP.  The javax.security.sasl package is not listed in any of the profiles, however javax.security.auth.sasl is listed.  Was javax.security.sasl deliberately excluded?
>
At this point in time, the proposal is that compact3 is the full JRE 
with APIs that comprise the Desktop, CORBA, and Web Services areas 
omitted. So SASL is there, it's a mistake that it's not listed in JEP 
(I'll fix that). I don't know if you are building jdk8/profiles but if 
you are then you'll see it.

Web Services (the main reason that the Java Activation Framework is 
included in Java SE) is clearly a discussion point as it may be 
important for some embedded server deployments. Ultimately it's up to 
the Java SE 8 JSR of course but one could envisage including the web 
services stack. You are right that this would mean including 
java.awt.datatransfer to avoid incompatible changes to JAF. The good 
news is that java.awt.datatransfer doesn't have API dependencies so it 
can be isolated (with some implementation changes).

As you bring this up then one thing to be aware of is that jdk8 has a 
new tool jdeps that can be used to look at the static dependencies of 
applications and libraries. The --profile option will translate those 
dependencies into a profile (although it's not completely wired up yet 
as the changes in jdk8/profiles aren't in the main tree yet).

-Alan