Service providers (was: Richard's comments)

[Stanley M. Ho]

Hi Richard,

I have renamed the subject so we can discuss issues around the
service-provider strawman in its own thread.

Richard S. Hall wrote:
> Hello Stanley,
> ...
> I guess the addition of service-related concepts into the module layer
> would be one example of feature creep for me. While I think it makes
> perfect sense to figure out how the Service Loader stuff will work on
> top of the module layer, pushing Service Loader concepts down into the
> module layer doesn't make any sense to me at all.
>
> It should be sufficient for the Service Loader to probe the installed
> modules and perhaps examine module metadata to determine if a module
> provides a service or not. From there, the Service Loader can create
> module instances and provider instances as necessary.
>
> If this is not possible in our current constructs, then we should
> address these shortcomings rather than adding higher layer concepts into
> the module layer.
>
> -> richard

The current service provider strawman suggests a few changes in
ModuleDefinition/Query classes, and you basically suggest that these
changes could be eliminated if we have a more generic way to express
services and service-providers in the module metadata and a generic way
to examine the information from the module metadata, all without
service-related APIs in the module layer.

I think what you suggested makes sense, and I will look into this.

- Stanley