[jboss-as7-dev] maven artifact based distributions/moduels/etc.

I've brought this up before, but I'd like to bring it up again. I think it would be immensely useful to be able to reference maven artifacts from a modules.xml file. i.e. <module xmlns="urn:jboss:module:1.1" name="org.jboss.resteasy.resteasy-jaxrs"> ... <resources> <resource-root artifact="org.jboss.resteasy:resteasy-jaxrs:2.3.4.Final"/> </resources> <dependencies> ... </dependencies> </module> * First things first, we could ship multiple profiles very easily as all jar dependencies point to a maven repository. A different profile becomes 100k instead of 100M. * Development becomes easier. If I'm coding Resteasy and testing with AS7, I just modify the AS7 module.xml to reflect the new maven artifact for resteasy. Then as I iterate on Resteasy, I just build resteasy, and AS7 automatically picks up the the snapshot (without having to manually copy jars or re-run AS7 dist scripts). * If you combines all module.xml files and standalone.xml into one big monster file/format a bunch of other things start to happen: - You don't even need a JBoss distribution to run AS7. All you would need is some small bin.jar and a maven repository. - You instantly have a cloud-ready provisioning file format - You instantly have a nice REST format. If you sprinkle in various Atom links so that you can easily micro manage - Managing the Fedora/RHEL/RPM poop becomes just managing a local maven repository. - You could also have a "jboss" executable that took a standalone.xml file as a parameter. The "jboss" executable is just a tiny script around the tiny boot.jar that should rarely change, if ever. This type of setup, IMO, makes a Fedora distribution feasible * I think this would make it easier to write a jboss-as7-maven-plugin as somebody could include a full standalone.xml in their resources directory much as the jetty-maven-plugin does with web-app/. * Even better, allow some form of "document inheritance/overrides", then you can embed specific jboss config/module changes directly within your pom.xml file. * Expand this even further and allow maven artifacts to be specified with JAR, WAR, EAR manifests and be included as deployable elements. This would allow a operating system wide shared library directly and allow us full applications and their third-party dependencies to be managed the same way Sys admins manage any other shared library on the system. -- Bill Burke JBoss, a division of Red Hat http://bill.burkecentral.com