[jboss-dev] Scanning jars for package capabilities

Resending with a zipped snapshot. Did not realize that the earlier html attachment was large. I was just looking at the profiler output against AS trunk today and noticed that considerable amount of time is being spent in the AbstractClassLoaderDeployer.deploy which internally creates a classloader for deployers/deployments. Internally a VFSDeploymentClassLoaderPolicyModule goes on to determine the "capabilities" of each module. This include traversing the jar file(s) to find out what "packages" are contained. Attached is the profiler snapshot. I was thinking whether we could reduce this time by having a INDEX.LIST file http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.5.0/docs/tooldocs/solaris/jar.html#i (or something similar) which would list the packages available/exposed in a jar file (sample generated file attached for jboss-common-core.jar). We cannot enforce this on end user deployments but atleast the jars shipped by the server probably could include this? This probably will have its own issues in terms of maintaining that list so that it does not become outdated. We could use the jar -i command to create the index files everytime a jar is generated, but again needs to be followed by each project. Is this something that we should be looking into? Or are there any better ways of dealing with this? -Jaikiran