Please rview simple clean up of the modules build for javac

[Alex Buckley]

On 4/5/2010 3:04 PM, Mandy Chung wrote:
> Jonathan Gibbons wrote:
>> I am surprised to see so many unqualified module names. Do we not 
>> expect folk to use qualified module names, and should we not lead the 
>> way by prefixing module names with some suitable "j" word?
> 
> The names of the jdk modules are yet to be finalized.   For the runtime 
> modules (i.e. classes from rt.jar), their names are qualified names 
> (currently they are prefixed by either "jdk." or "sun.").  The modules 
> with unqualified module names are the non-runtime modules (such as 
> javac, apt, and other jdk tools).   Is there a guideline or convention 
> for the module names?

It is instructive to browse http://www.jarvana.com/jarvana/browse and 
see the names of projects in the central Maven repository. Maven 
identifies a module by a triple: groupId, artifactId, version. 
Paraphrasing "Maven: The Definitive Guide", the group identifier should 
be the reverse domain name of the creating organization (e.g. 
org.apache), and the artifact identifier should be the module name. This 
convention is not always followed; witness the commons-* groups. Even 
when the group identifier is a reverse domain name, it is sometimes 
suffixed by a sub-organization or product family, e.g. 
org.apache.lucene. Further, in a popular repository, the number of 
entries under 'org' or 'com' is so large that the additional top level 
provides little benefit. And in 2010, people search rather than 
classify; a module name arguably ought to reflect, more than anything 
else, the terms used in a search engine to find the module.

Since JDK modules only have name (+version), not group and artifact 
(+version), we must structure our names wisely. (Actually, avoiding 
group is a blessing, for reasons associated with JCP profiles that I 
shall not discuss here.)

Publicly distributed modules like the JDK should always have qualified 
names. I do not believe starting a module name with a reverse domain 
name is appropriate, because it obscures browsing module repositories 
and there are too many projects willing to ignore the convention. Using 
the commonly-searched-for product name such as 'jdk' as the first 
component seems ideal. Again, in 2010, the existence of large 
repositories means that picking a globally unique name is not so hard 
that it requires recourse to domain names.

Alex