Still driving off the cliff

[David Bosschaert]

On 27 February 2012 15:20, David M. Lloyd <david.lloyd at redhat.com> wrote:
> On 02/27/2012 07:42 AM, Alan Bateman wrote:
>>
>> On 24/02/2012 18:50, David M. Lloyd wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>> Honestly I don't even see the need to actually divide the platform
>>> into actual modules. If the desire is to be able to express
>>> dependencies on certain features of the platform which would be made
>>> optional, then this can be done with module aliases or views or
>>> feature dependencies or any number of other ways which don't carry
>>> this cost.
>>>
>> Duke has a beer belly, we need to be able to scale down the platform to
>> smaller devices.
>
>
> Yes I *get* that but the actual pieces of the core platform do not have to
> be modules.  We have modules blinders on here.  You could just as easily
> associate a "feature name" with the optional sections of code, and allow a
> dependency to name a module plus a feature set.  In this way you solve the
> problem just as well, your core platform is still componentized, modules
> which depend on an optional platform feature still can express a dependency,
> and you don't lose your 1:1 relationship between a module and a class
> loader.  You could even call them "submodules" if that seems more
> appropriate.

In OSGi something like this also exists. It's called a 'framework
extension', which is effectively a module that at runtime is merged
with the framework (bundle 0) and hence shares its classloader.

David