Service Providersand versioning

[Sean Mullan]

I have been starting to think about how JCE providers might be deployed 
as jigsaw services. [1] notes that services do not have version numbers.

One of the current limitations with the JCE provider framework is that 
it is not a good idea to add a new parameter to an 
AlgorithmParameterSpec subclass, because existing provider 
implementations will not be aware of that new parameter until they are 
upgraded.

We usually have to define a new AlgorithmParameterSpec subclass to be 
able to identify providers that have not been upgraded (they will throw 
an InvalidAlgorithmParameterException), or a completely new algorithm type.

It would be nice if we could find a cleaner solution to this problem 
with jigsaw, but without a versioning mechanism I'm not sure if it is 
possible. Any thoughts on this?

Thanks,
Sean

[1] http://openjdk.java.net/projects/jigsaw/doc/topics/services.html