Project Jigsaw goals and requirements

[Richard S. Hall]

On 6/2/11 11:07, Benoît Thiébault wrote:
> Hi everyone,
>
> This discussion about Jigsaw requirements is very interesting and
> constructive and I am really looking forward to see what Java modules
> will be capable of.
>
> Just to add my own set of remarks, I would like to point that support
> for native librairies is very important and should not be neglected.
>
> In OSGi, it is already feasible, but it is poorly documented and has
> some very strong constraints (as explained here:
> http://dev.artenum.com/blog/ben/posts/osgi_vtk_and_macosx). One of the
> most annoying things is to have to explicitly call System.loadLibrary()
> for every shared library and its dependencies to tell OSGi framework
> what .so (.dll or .jnilib) files to extract from the jar bundle.

To be precise, this is not really an OSGi issue, but a more general one 
about native library dependencies...Java can only intercept native 
library load requests coming from Java code. Arbitrary native libraries 
that have dependencies on other native libraries cannot be intercepted 
by Java and automatically loaded by the JVM. The procedure you describe 
above is simply a workaround.

> Another requirement that I have not seen up to now is the ability to
> have a distributed application based on modules. On the OSGi side, there
> is DOSGi (http://cxf.apache.org/) that is supposed to fulfil this
> requirement but I have not tested it yet outside prototypes and I have
> no idea how mature it is.

Distribution is largely an orthogonal issue.

-> richard