RFR: Further support for JSON-based module-info descriptors

[David Bosschaert]

On 15 May 2012 08:48, Shi Jun Zhang <zhangshj at linux.vnet.ibm.com> wrote:
> On 5/14/2012 4:09 PM, David Bosschaert wrote:
>>
>> Hi all,
>>
>> I've expanded the JSON-based module descriptor support. I think it now
>> supports all the features that module-info.java supports.
>> I also added encoding detection to the JSON parser code. According to
>> http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc4627.txt section 3 a JSON file should
>> always be in unicode. The JSON parser can now deal with UTF-8, UTF-16
>> and UTF-32 (there are test files included to test this functionality
>> too).
>> Also added, more tests, including a test that shows how a
>> module-info.json file can be expanded with custom metadata, very much
>> like what it could look for OSGi.
>>
>> You can find the webrev here:
>> http://cr.openjdk.java.net/~davidb/mijson2/webrev.01
>>
>> Best regards,
>>
>> David
>>
> Hi David,
>
> The patch looks good to me.
>
> One question: Is there any API to get the custom metadata?

Hi Shi Jun,

It's a good question which probably requires some further discussion
and thought.
Personally I was thinking that there is no need for such an API. The
JSON metadata will be available in the module/jar file in
META-INF/module-info.json so any other component can still obtain it
as-is and parse it for its own needs, obtaining any extensions to the
metadata that it's interested in.

Another benefit of not providing the metadata through an API is that
the module information inside JavaSE does not need to remember this in
any way. It can just parse the pieces of module-info.json that its
interested in and skip the rest. So there is a memory footprint
benefit there too.

Best regards,

David