Relationship to JSR 291 [was: Re: Bryan's comments]

[Stanley M. Ho]

Andy Piper wrote:
> ...
> 1. The ability to express a feature in terms of its constituent
> packages. Note that import-by-name doesn't really help here since the
> actual packages are distributed across multiple modules. What I
> really want is some kind of feature module that exports these
> packages to you when you ask for the feature.

Unless I miss something, this is the main use case that import-by-name
would address. Developers can package all the classes related to a
feature (e.g. networking, xml, swing, ejb, etc.) into a module, and it
exports (or reexports from other modules) all the things you need; other
developers who want to use the feature would simply import that module
by name. In fact, this is how we intend to use the module system to
modularize various components in the SE platform.

- Stanley