[jboss-as7-dev] Access to public API jars from (remote) client applications

[Jason T. Greene]

On 11/13/11 8:18 AM, Jaikiran Pai wrote:
> I'm writing up the documentation for invoking remote EJBs from a
> (really) remote application like standalone Java applications. One of
> the things that we have to decide about is how we want the users to
> access some of our public API jars (I'm not calling this "client" jars
> since one of the previous discussions around this suggested that it
> would confuse things). Right now we don't have a way where users can
> *easily* add these public API jars to their classpath. Some of the
> requirements that I can think of are:
>
> 1) These jars must be available at a well known location within the AS
> distribution. i.e. the users shouldn't have to drill down into
> individual module path to find the jars.

My only problem with this is that it bloats our JAR size. Perhaps we 
should do a separate client dist, or perhaps an ant/mvn script to 
assemble the "client" jars.

> 2) The jar names shouldn't contain the version names (since that will
> require changes to client scripts if some API jar version changes)
> 3) Modular environment on the client side is not a requirement. i.e. the
> client application should just be able add these jars to their classpath
> and use them

Agreed

> 4) IDE and build tool requirements should be taken into account
> separately. i.e. a "bom" or some other IDE specific way of getting
> access to these API jars _shouldn't_ be the only way of referencing
> these jars.
> 5) Identifying the public API jars

I think this should be:

ejb client
iiop client (only has a handful of classes)
controller client
[and all of the deps from the above]

What's not so clear is what to do with:

infinispan
hornetq

I don't think these have a "pure client" dist.

-- 
Jason T. Greene
JBoss AS Lead / EAP Platform Architect
JBoss, a division of Red Hat