[jboss-dev] Public vs. Private APIs

[Jason T. Greene]

David M. Lloyd wrote:
> On 12/05/2008 09:33 AM, Andrig Miller wrote:
> ...
>> As this discussion took place internally, we starting batting around 
>> the idea of separately all the things we would like to be private into 
>> its own lib directory.  So having one lib directory where have all the 
>> API's that we intend to have customers/users use, and one where we 
>> have everything else, so we can clearly communicate what should be 
>> used and what shouldn't be used directly.
> 
> We should make *everything* private in my opinion.  Then, in *each* 
> deployer we decide what capabilities are implicitly imported (JavaEE 
> deployments will bring in the JavaEE classes for example) and use that 
> information to build classloading metadata for that module.
> 
> Then we decide what other third-party capabilities we want to make 
> available to users by default, should they *explicitly* request them 
> (things like log4j/slf4j, quartz, hibernate, commons-crap, etc. spring 
> to mind).
> 
> This would mean packaging up libraries with a wrapper JAR or something 
> and including a jboss-classloading.xml for each one.  There was a thread 
> in the MC development forum (I think) about this specifically, but I 
> can't find it...
> 

Exactly, in addition to isolating internal classes, we really need to 
have "API jars" for all of our proprietary APIs we support.

-- 
Jason T. Greene
JBoss, a division of Red Hat