2 Replies Latest reply on Oct 30, 2008 7:41 PM by peterj

    direction of JBoss with osgi is what?

    deanhiller

      I am looking at this ear file thing and see jars all over the place like so

      myapp.ear
      +-lib
      ....+- jars location 1
      + jars location 2
      + mywar.war
      ....+ WEB-INF
      ..........+- jars location 3

      Well, I come from OSGi where everything is exposed as a shared library or a not shared library. It is very simple and there are really only those two choices. When a service, you may be accessible by some services and not others. I look at this ear file and think the following
      1. jars location 3...okay, I get that, these are LIBRARIES only used in the war
      2. Then there is jars location1 and 2 which is weird. jars location1 is like shared libraries. What is jars location 2 then? Are they shared or not?

      Are they going to clean this up to the point where it is as easy as OSGi. In OSGi, every jar is either shared or not shared. when it is shared, the client then defines whether it is using that shared jar or just using it's own library. It is really quite simple and I thought JBoss 5 was using Osgi now, but it does not seem to have propagated up.

      For those who don't know: in OSGi, in your shared library jar, you just define what packages are exposed and can be used in other services. In the other services jars, you just define what you import....if you have your own library, just don't import. It works beautifully and gives you the full power. I feel very limited in JBoss in that I cannot share my EJB layer between two ear files(and I hate ears....I wish it was just OSGi bundles and war files which covers just about everything including sar, har, jar, etc. etc. just by tweaking the manifest file).

      Anyways, this is just my opinion but it would be nice to know the direction of JBoss and if it will catch up to the power of OSGi when it comes to Classloaders which is where OSGi rules on making the complicated simple.
      Dean