[jboss-dev] new profiles for AS6 + mvn artifact classloading

[Bill Burke]

For AS6 I was wondering if we could do a couple of things:

1. Ditch the old profiles.  Remove 'all', 'default', and 'minimal'. 
Replace with 'production' and 'development'.

'production' would be tuned for runtime performance, security, and 
anything else we can think of.  It would also be the 'all' profile 
containing clustering jars, etc.  'development' would be tuned for boot 
time performance, i.e. zero-persistence HornetQ, removal of unneeded 
development components (like clustering) and anything else we can think 
of.  It might also be interesting to create a 'legacy' profile which 
contains things like EJB2, JAX-RPC, the ancient scheduler, and anything 
else we can think of.  These legacy components would be removed from 
'development' and maybe 'production'.  I don't know, just some ideas. 
Maybe 'production' also has a boot-bean that checks to see if people 
have changed the password for the management console, hornetq, etc...

2. I really want to push the 'booting from a local maven repository' 
idea that has been floated around by me and many others.  Of course, I 
like what I did as it is a minimal code change, minimal processing, and 
a very simple interface to <classloader>, but I don't care what code is 
used.  I think there are a few advantages to this approach:

- Our main distribution becomes smaller.  How much?  Not sure, but I'm 
guessing at least 25% smaller.

- Shipping a profile becomes much smaller and can be just a bunch of 
text files and directories.  Such shipped profiles could have a simple 
pom.xml that downloaded all the dependend libraries into the user's 
local maven repository.


Now, I'm not suggesting we just do these things outright.  We could blog 
about it, post on forums, ask customers, etc.  Get some input before we 
make the changes.  But, IMO, the above are simple changes that require 
only a bit of monotonous, brain-dead work.


-- 
Bill Burke
JBoss, a division of Red Hat
http://bill.burkecentral.com