Context and expectations

[Rémi Forax]

On 07/21/2012 12:43 AM, Daniel Latrémolière wrote:

Hi Daniel,

...

>
> Honestly, I continue to dislike Jigsaw remembered goal: "The goal of 
> this Project is to design and implement a standard module system for 
> the Java SE Platform, and to apply that system to the Platform itself 
> and to the JDK.", because "module" say all or nothing depending of 
> reader, but is not a clear set of potentially independent features 
> (internal improvement of OpenJDK code, abstraction for hiding some 
> parts of implementation, deployment package compatible with RPM/DEB, 
> object with an externally managed lifecycle, storage repository for 
> code and JIT metadata, etc.) coming each with his improvements to 
> developer/sysadmin life (the only real goals of OpenJDK for me) and 
> needing or not new public API/language changes.
> I would prefer something like "The goal of this Project is to design 
> and implement a module system for the Java SE Platform, to improve 
> abstraction in Java code and increase performance of VM and simplicity 
> of deployment."
> For me, Java developers has no direct interest to know if Jigsaw is 
> used by OpenJDK itself or not (it is an OpenJDK-implementation detail 
> and not a goal, even if it is a big detail). By example, OpenJDK can 
> use specific extensions to Jigsaw (not public module API) for his own 
> modularisation without any knowledge from Java developer.

There are several reasons to not do that. You create an artificial 
barrier between the OpenJDK code and the application code so you raise 
the entry ticket for anyone that want to provide a patch or fix a bug in 
the JDK, you force application developers to use their own solution to 
solve exactly the same problem, so each implementations (the OpenJDK one 
included) will be less tested.

Netbeans has modules, JBoss, Eclipse have modules too. How many kind of 
modules did you want before thinking that having a good standard module 
API in the JDK is a good idea. It's better to provide a feature that 
everybody can use, that is well tested and for the sake of shaping the 
API, eating our own dog food is in my opinion a very good idea.

> Daniel.

cheers,
Rémi