[jboss-dev] AS jars from maven repository

[Bill Burke]

I've made a small change to jboss-classloading-vfs in my working copy so 
that you can define a <maven-artifact> within a beans <classloader> 
declaration, i.e.:

    <classloader name="resteasy-classloader" 
xmlns="urn:jboss:classloader:1.0" export-all="NON_EMPTY" import-all="true">
 
<maven-artifact>org.jboss.resteasy:resteasy-jaxrs:2.0-RC1</maven-artifact>
 
<maven-artifact>org.jboss.resteasy:async-http-servlet-3.0:2.0-RC1</maven-artifact>
    </classloader>

It has no dependency on the profile service (not sure why Scott/Julien 
wanted to do it that way anyways), just a simple change to the 
VFSClassLoaderPolicyModule and XML metadata classes.

I currently have it hardcoded to look in $HOME/.m2/repository for maven 
artifacts, and it assumes the .jar name can be discovered from the 
artifact URI.

Any interest and moving this forward at all?  The idea would be to look 
for artifacts in this order:

1. $JBOSS_MAVEN_REPOSITORY
2. $JBOSS_HOME/maven-repository
3. $HOME/.m2/repository

The repository would have to be on local disk.  This would greatly 
reduce our distribution size as there would be no copies of jars 
anywhere.  It would also help development as you would not have to keep 
rebuilding the AS distribution, or manually copying jar files to test 
individual work you are doing.  It would just be a change to the 
artifact declaration.

The work would be in creating a <classloader> entry in each deployment 
and creating the $JBOSS_HOME/maven-repository.  A maven plugin could be 
written to create a beans file with classloader info in it.  The only 
problem I see with that is some deployment units have multiple beans.xml 
  files and I don't know if <classloader> is processed in all beans.xml 
first before the bean metadata.

I also might need some help if there are any scoping issues as the 
classloader code is a spaghetti mess.


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