[jbosscache-dev] Jarring jars

[Manik Surtani]

The list of jars JBoss Cache ships with is growing.  And this is, as  
you can imagine, a PITA.

* Core libs - commons-logging, jgroups, concurrent (needed by JGroups  
< 2.5), jboss-serialization, jboss-common-core
* Pojocache libs - trove, jboss-aop, javassist, microcontainer jars  
(4 jars here!!)
* JDK1.4-compat distro: 4 extra jars here
* Optional jars: c3p0 (DB connection pooling for standalone use),  
bdbje and jdbm for specific cache loaders.

Looking at how Bill's packaged libs up for embedded EJB, he's got an  
ant task that jars up all the jars into a single file.

<jar jarfile="UberJar.jar">
	<zipfileset file="jar1.jar" />
	<zipfileset file="jar2.jar" />
	...
</jar>

What do you think?  This way the JBoss Cache distro can ship with a  
minimal number of jars:

* Core: jboss-cache.jar, jboss-cache-deps.jar
* PojoCache: jboss-cache.jar, jboss-cache-deps.jar, pojo-cache-deps.jar
* JDK1.4-compat: jboss-cache.jar, jboss-cache-deps-JDK14.jar
* Optional jars

What do you guys think of this approach?  It may mean a replication  
of jars (you may already have commons-logging or jboss-serialization  
in your libs) but these jars are small and not a huge impact on  
size.  What about wanting to swap out jars, e.g., JGroups?

Thoughts?
--
Manik Surtani

Lead, JBoss Cache
JBoss, a division of Red Hat

Email: manik at jboss.org
Telephone: +44 7786 702 706
MSN: manik at surtani.org
Yahoo/AIM/Skype: maniksurtani