Creating modules with JDK8

[Simon Ochsenreither]

Hi,

> All told, it could complicates the build a bit and this is
> where good tooling could help a lot.

is there anything planned in this direction yet? Because the rest of the
JVM ecosystem seems to remain largely apathetic towards it.

A small list of issues which remain to be tackled:

- No usable separation between runtime of the build tool and runtime of
the code to be compiled. (You can do it, but it's annoying and hard to
setup.)
- No support for runtime versioning in Maven/Ivy. (Currently people seem
to use horrible hacks like using one major version for e.g. Java 6, and
another major version with Java 8), meaning it is completely impossible
to specify currently "I want to have versions of my dependencies that
run on JDK X".
- Versioning/artifact structure differences between major tools like
Maven and Ivy cause a lot of unnecessary churn and complexity.
- JDK artifacts are not available through dependency resolution tools,
meaning installing the JVM/JDK is a separate step which needs to be
handled outside of the usual build tools. (Which in turn makes
reproducible builds across different machines annoying.)
- No small enough _supported_ JVM runtime which could be bundled with
build tools, meaning the setup is yet-another step beginners have to
deal with.
- The two things above combined mean that it's currently not possible to
have a build tool which can bootstrap itself properly.

While I understand that Oracle doesn't make money with developer
happiness or ease-of-use it holds some of the important keys to
improvements in its hand.

> As you bring up JMOD files then it's just an alternative packaging
> format. At this time then it's mostly for modules that are intended to
> be linked into a run-time image (meaning a JRE, JDK or custom run-time)
> - it isn't currently an execution format. I could imagine Maven plugins
> supporting it as a new artifact type in the future.

How would we read these files when running on earlier JDK versions?

Thanks,

Simon