Purpose
As components of the Application Server mature into their own projects, it will become increasingly difficult to manage them as a part of the "jboss" project. They will have their own contributors, releases, components and libraries. Coordinating all of this effort in a single project is simply not scalable.
The obvious solution is to decouple these "super subprojects" from the main Application Server project. With respect to the application server, they will become external dependencies much like JGroups and Hibernate.
However, splitting the Application Server into multiple projects presents new challenges and requires a fresh approach to the build system. Some of the issues which need addressing:
Continuous Integration &150; Multiple parallel lines of development must be integrated at regular intervals. What was once accomplished by a cvs update and rebuild must now be done by other means.
Version Alignment &150; Projects need the ability to manage their own dependencies. However, the versions of these dependencies must align when projects are aggregated into the Application Server.
Source vs Binary Tradeoff &150; A developer shouldn't have to checkout the source for all dependencies to build a given project. Likewise, it should be possible to checkout a dependency and quickly test modifications to that dependency with the project.
This document will define a Dependency Management System which will address the above issues.
Comments