[jboss-as7-dev] path for common libraries

[David M. Lloyd]

On 04/27/2011 07:32 AM, Francesco Marchioni wrote:
> Dear AS devs,
> I was looking at the structure of the Beta3 release. Both standalone and
> domain contain a "lib/ext" path. Is it intended as replacement for
> common/lib of earlier JBoss AS releases ?

Definitely *not*.  The lib/ext directory is there to support Java SE/EE 
style "extensions".  If you don't know what those are, don't bother to 
learn because they're dumb. :-)  We only support them for spec-completeness.

> Later on I'd like to extract Classloading information for classes loaded
> in this path and see how it compares with the libraries loaded in the
> "modules" repository. Will post a follow-up.

It's nothing special.  We have some deployers which look for 
Extension-List in deployed JARs, and links them up against the 
appropriate JAR in here, or in the JDK ext/lib dir, or in other deployed 
"extensions".  Like I said it's a pretty dopey mechanism, especially 
compared to modules, and we only support it because of the spec; I don't 
foresee actually recommending anyone use it in real life.

-- 
- DML