[jboss-dev] Releasing JBoss 4 with the latest versions of AOP, Remoting, Serialization, etc.

[Ovidiu Feodorov]

I am summarizing a discussion that has been taking place in private for
a while:

Messaging relies on the latest versions of AOP, Remoting and
Serialization. In oder to make it work in JBoss 4, we need to scope the
broker. This is a pain for users: they also need to deploy scoped MDB
containers, destination and connection factory MBeans, recovery
managers, etc. and from our experience so far, is the fist source of
user trouble, as reflected on our user forum. We tried to compensate by
writing installation scripts, and detailed documentation explaining the
reasons behind this situation and procedures to deal with it, but that
doesn't alleviate too much the fact that the whole thing is a pain.

All this could be avoided if we start shipping JBoss 4 with the latest
releases of Messaging's dependencies (AOP, Remoting and Serialization).
If Messaging finds the right versions of the dependency classes it needs
in the top-level class repository, the need for scoping disappears.

Releases (at least theoretically) are supposed to be backward
compatible, so, in theory it should be possible to ship with the latest
versions.

 From discussion with Dimitris , Thomas and Tom Elrod we identified one
compatibility problem in Web Services. I am reproducing the discussion
below:

Thomas Diesler wrote:
> I believe the underlying problem is that remoting is not backwards 
> compatible.
>
> #1 If jbossas-4.0.5 uses the new remoting, jbossws-1.0.3 will break
> #2 If jbossws-1.0.4 switches to the remoting, it won't be usable until 
> jbossas-4.0.6
>
> I suggest TElrod provides backwards compatibility for the new 
> remoting. The old API can
> be deprecated but should still work. If that can be done jbossas can 
> switch at any time.


Tom Elrod wrote:
> Integration work for migrating these projects to remoting 2.0.0 
> release has already been started and can be reviewed at 
> http://jira.jboss.com/jira/browse/JBREM-565 (along with the 
> corresponding jira issues).
>
> Another one of the big changes between 2.0.0 and previous releases is 
> introduction of wire versioning which makes it so that it can not 
> communicate with the previous versions out of the box.  However, there 
> is a configuration setting that can be used to make it so it can 
> communicate with previous version and can find more info on that at 
> http://labs.jboss.com/portal/jbossremoting/docs/guide/ch12.html. 
This looks to me like a issue that can be worked out relatively easily.

Aside from that, I was wondering if there are other practical
consideration that would prevent us to release JBoss 4 with the latest
versions of AOP, Remoting and Serialization?

Thanks
Ovidiu