[jboss-as7-dev] jax-rs deployments have incomplete module imports

[Jason Greene]

On Sep 12, 2012, at 1:13 PM, Bill Burke <bburke at redhat.com> wrote:

> I'm sending this here before I submit a JIRA.
> 
> JAX-RS deployments need to import more dependencies, specifically:
> 
> * the jackson libraries
> * Apache Http Client 4 libraries
> 
> Jackson and HC4 are often used within jax-rs deployments because users 
> need to add additional configuration and initialization that can only be 
> done programmatically.

OK but are you sure you want to support direct usage of those libraries? Part of the reason why we don't re-export third party libs we use is because we want the flexibility to upgrade/drop/replace, and we don't want to support a user using say google collections, just because we made use of it in our code base.

(In case it sounds that way, I'm not arguing against you, I am just legitimately asking if you want to worry about maintenance of those items. If so no problem)
> 
> Another thing:
> 
> Can modules be declared with empty <resources>?  It would be cool if we 
> could have a resteasy module with which all it did was define what 
> modules it would export to a deployment.  Right now this metadata is 
> hardcoded, correct?  This sucks for multiple reasons.  One: users will 
> have to manually define a lot of module dependencies, or they will end 
> up including resteasy and thirdparty libraries that may conflict and 
> cause CCEs.  Two:  Its very hard for me to provide a patch to AS7 if I 
> want to provide *ALL* features that come with the resteasy distribution. 
>  Sure I could include and export everything within the current resteasy 
> default module, but I would rather have separate modules for these features.

Sure we do that for javaee for example (aggregation modules). If you would like to make an aggregate for JAX-RS thats fine, the only problem is you will prevent people from being able to exclude anything in that list. So to use an example if you add apache http client 4.1, and a user decides they want 3.0 or 5.0, they would have to exclude the aggregate module, and then include everything in it except http client. You could also do various different common combinations.
> 
> Another alternative could be to only distribute and export the core 
> resteasy modules with AS7.  Then, users would just include other 
> resteasy features/components/jars directly within their deployments.
> 

Yeah that could work as well.