[jboss-dev] Weird thought of the day: maven-based booting

instead of the way our JBoss AS distribution is structure now, why not introduce the idea of maven-based booting and deployment? Core components (specifically deployers, sars, really anything in the JBoss domain) of a profile (default, minimal, all, etc.) would only include bean.xml and other configuration files. Within beans.xml or a different file, each deployment unit would specify its dependencies, either through <dependency> elements, or a list of maven artifacts, i.e. org.jboss.resteasy:resteasy-jaxrs:2.0 That way our distribution can be either very very tiny, just a zip of text files that point to our maven repository. Or, very optimized, we ship a maven repository with the distribution that shared between the different profiles. This could get very interesting over time. Deployment units could delegate to the base AS for versioning, much like maven modules delegate to a parent pom for dependency versions. We could automatically create scoped deployments or issue warnings if base AS and the deployment unit require different library versions, etc. Just a thought... Bill -- Bill Burke JBoss, a division of Red Hat http://bill.burkecentral.com