DRAFT: Project Jigsaw: The Big Picture (part 1)

[David Bosschaert]

The module definition doesn't look like Java at all to me, take this example
  module bar @ 1.0 {
    requires foo;
    exports bar;
    view bar.internal {
      permits baz;
      exports bar.private;
    }
  }
so I really don't think it should be part of the java language itself.
I think it will require a lot of extensions to the language and
introduce 'pseudo' keywords - keywords that are only keywords inside
the module section, but not elsewhere.
Besides, I still like to see how this can be made extensible as required in [1].

Additionally, you say that the module declaration is by convention in
a module-info.java file. I think we need something stronger than a
convention here as I don't think you'd want 2 files both declaring the
module definitions inside a single module.
I think we should mandate a single module definition file in a
well-known location such as  /META-INF/module-info.jmod where the
format of that module-info.jmod is either a text-based DSL (maybe
similar to the module declaration above, but then extensible) or using
XML.

I have made this point before, but I don't feel it has been taken into
consideration appropriately in the current design.

Best regards,

David

[1] http://openjdk.java.net/projects/jigsaw/doc/draft-java-module-system-requirements-12#extensible-module-declarations

On 20 December 2011 23:28,  <mark.reinhold at oracle.com> wrote:
> I've started drafting an overview of the current state of Jigsaw.
> The first part is attached below, and also available on the web:
>
>  http://cr.openjdk.java.net/~mr/jigsaw/notes/jigsaw-big-picture-01
>
> Comments, questions, and suggestions welcome.  Flames will be ignored.
>
> - Mark