[jbosscache-dev] Jarring jars

[Scott Marlow]

Manik Surtani wrote:
> 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?
>
+1 For this approach as it helps the "Java jar version hell" problem 
that occurs when an application wants to use a different version of a 
jar than various JBoss projects uses.  I'm assuming that we would also 
change the package name otherwise the "jar version hell" problem is not 
solved. 

This would make it difficult to swap in a new jgroups jar but I'm 
assuming that we wouldn't jarjar the jgroups.jar.

In case anyone is not familiar with the jarjar ant task, this page talks 
about it http://tonicsystems.com/products/jarjar/manual/.

> 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
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> jbosscache-dev mailing list
> jbosscache-dev at lists.jboss.org
> https://lists.jboss.org/mailman/listinfo/jbosscache-dev
>