Proposal: #NonHierarchicalLayers

[Thomas Watson]

> 
> I think I'm also running across the same issue that Tom Watson raised 
> last Tuesday about not knowing in advance what services are being used 
> by a module.  I seem to recall that we discussed allowing the Layer to 
> mediate service load requests made by modules within that layer; is that 

> something I've recalled correctly, and if so, is that option still on 
> the table?
> 
> -- 
> - DML
> 

The way I got around this for services provided by boot layer was to 
discover ALL the services provided by the boot layer which come from 
unqualified exported packages.  I then define ModuleDescriptors for each 
OSGi bundle that uses each and every one of the 'public' services provided 
by the boot layer.  This allowed my to effectively state that a module for 
an OSGi bundle uses * services from the boot layer.  But this also 
required me to make each OSGi bundle's ModuleDescription require any 
module from boot which exports a packages that contains the contract API 
being loaded by the ServiceLoader.  Otherwise a failure will occur 
creating the configuration because JPMS thinks the module using the 
service does not have access to the service contract.

I would be interested to hear what ideas there are around allowing a Layer 
Controller to influence this behavior such that we can detect 
ServiceLoader usage by modules in our layers and addUses at runtime as 
appropriate for our module systems.  Perhaps a more simple option is to 
simply allow any attempt at ServiceLoader.load, without checking for 
service uses, from modules that are contained in a Layer that was resolved 
with with the 'resolveRequires' vs. the 'resolveRequiresAndUses' method.

Tom