[jboss-dev] Weird thought of the day: maven-based booting

[Bill Burke]

BTW, I got this idea when I was doing testing with RESTEasy against AS 6 
trunk.  My thought was, "wouldn't it be cool if AS just loaded RESTEasy 
from my local maven repository so that I didn't have to manually copy to 
or rebuild the AS distribution?"  I guess what I'm saying is that it 
would help make us more productive too.

Also, from a product standpoint, it would be very easy for us to define 
and ship different profiles.  A profile would be so small, it could 
easily be archived and distributed through a maven repository.  Could 
easily be sent across the wire for support engineers to look at, etc.

Bill Burke wrote:
> instead of the way our JBoss AS distribution is structure now, why not 
> introduce the idea of maven-based booting and deployment?
> 
> Core components (specifically deployers, sars, really anything in the 
> JBoss domain) of a profile (default, minimal, all, etc.) would only 
> include bean.xml and other configuration files.  Within beans.xml or a 
> different file, each deployment unit would specify its dependencies, 
> either through <dependency> elements, or a list of maven artifacts, i.e.
> 
> org.jboss.resteasy:resteasy-jaxrs:2.0
> 
> That way our distribution can be either very very tiny, just a zip of 
> text files that point to our maven repository.  Or, very optimized, we 
> ship a maven repository with the distribution that shared between the 
> different profiles.
> 
> This could get very interesting over time.  Deployment units could 
> delegate to the base AS for versioning, much like maven modules delegate 
> to a parent pom for dependency versions.  We could automatically create 
> scoped deployments or issue warnings if base AS and the deployment unit 
> require different library versions, etc.
> 
> Just a thought...
> 
> Bill
> 
> 

-- 
Bill Burke
JBoss, a division of Red Hat
http://bill.burkecentral.com