[jboss-dev-forums] [JBoss AS 7 Development] - Re: jboss-modules: Module Repository SPI and Extensibility

[Randall Hauch]

Randall Hauch [https://community.jboss.org/people/rhauch] created the discussion

"Re: jboss-modules: Module Repository SPI and Extensibility"

To view the discussion, visit: https://community.jboss.org/message/772209#772209

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This would be a great feature. I have another use case that this capability would hopefully help with.

*Installing custom AS7 subsystems*
AS7 makes it pretty straightforward to add functionality by creating custom subsystems. But at the moment, delivering those subsystems to users is difficult. Currently the only practical and easy option is to provide a ZIP file with modules and supporting files (e.g., XSDs, sample standalone configurations, etc.) that users can expand over the top of their AS7 installations. However, as the community starts building up an ecosystem of subsystems and modules, the ZIP approach becomes more difficult for both producers and consumers. 

Consider a subsystem that requires its own modules, plus requires several other modularized libraries. This currently requires obtaining the ZIP file for each modularized library. Yet the modules already include dependency information, a module repository (and repository-compatible ModuleLoader) could automatically installing the (not-yet-installed) required dependencies.

A concrete example of this is ModeShape's subsystem for AS7, which depends upon (among others) Hibernate Search and Lucene. At the moment, there is no modularlized form of Hibernate Search or Lucene, so ModeShape currently provides them. This makes installation of ModeShape very easy (it's just a single ZIP file), but we don't want to be in the business of providing modules for 3rd party libraries. It also makes it harder to install multiple subsystems that provide the same modules into the same AS7 installation. Ideally, these modules would be available in a repository and AS7 would automatically download them as needed. This would make it much easier to package subsystems as well as installing multiple subsystems into a single AS7 installations.
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