Extents of extensibility ("is this thing on?")

[David Bosschaert]

On 20 July 2012 00:56, Debasish Ray Chawdhuri
<debasish.raychawdhuri at gmail.com> wrote:
> 1. I agree with you, in fact there has been a discussion in Jigsaw-dev
> regarding other formats for module metadata and leaving the compiler alone.
> I supported the idea of creating other formats like JSON. People even came
> up with some small JSON parsers. But it did not pass the process [or not
> taken so seriously I am not sure]. It would have been easier for other
> build aware systems like Maven to use this metadata if the metadata is in
> plain text form.

The JSON parser for Jigsaw is actually implemented in the OpenJDK
Project Penrose forest [1]. Not sure what process you are referring to
but it has been reviewed at Penrose, merged and the demos have been
updated to use it.
Granted we didn't have time yet to update all the tools to use the
JSON metadata just yet, but it works at runtime [2] similar to
module-info.class but has the benefit of increased extensibility,
increased readability without needing to extend the Java language.
Jigsaw is free to take these relevant commits from Penrose and add
this feature to its codebase.

David

[1] http://openjdk.java.net/projects/penrose/
[2] see here for two tests that show it in action:
http://hg.openjdk.java.net/penrose/jigsaw/jdk/file/507fae0a1d80/test/org/openjdk/jigsaw/hello-json.sh
and http://hg.openjdk.java.net/penrose/jigsaw/jdk/file/1d2576346081/test/org/openjdk/jigsaw/hello-json-custom.sh