[jboss-as7-dev] Modules and hidden packages

There is a mechanism in JBoss Modules to support packages which are not visible to consumers of a module. The idea is to come up with an easy convention so that we can put module-private APIs and classes in one place that is visible from multiple packages, without exposing or documenting these packages. Until 1.2, the only way available to do this for statically defined modules was to add an export filter in your module.xml via the <exports> element to exclude the specific package directories that are hidden. Starting in 1.2, you can also create a series of packages whose first segment is "_private". These packages will automatically be excluded from the exported paths list. What I'd like to propose is: 1) For any given module, all generated JavaDoc should exclude packages under the _private hierarchy. 2) For any module which does i18n logging, all logging messages should be consolidated in one or more (but preferably one) interface(s) stored in a public _private.org.yourproject.YourInterface. 3) Once the new name is announced, I think we should break up our main logging IDs into per-subsystem categories. For example, "XXEE" for EE, "XXEJB" for EJB, etc., each with their own numerical space and message interface. These two changes should put an end to our log message ID fragmentation problems and give us a (one-time only!) chance to clean up this mess. 4) Projects that wish to exploit this mechanism can do so, noting that they should use "_private.org.yourproject" as a package prefix instead of just putting things directly under "_private" (to avoid conflicts when JARs are used on a flat class path). Flame on! -- - DML