I might have misunderstood this thread, but it seems to have some relation to ivy, a dependency manager, see http://www.jayasoft.fr/org/modules/ivy/overview.php
On 11/05/05, Richard S. Hall <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Peter Donald wrote: > > > Richard S. Hall wrote: > > > >> However, while I agree that Sun's implementation does provide some > >> modularity mechanisms, there seems to be two short comings: > >> > >> 1. The mechanisms themselves do not go far enough, they only provide > >> minimal capabilities. > > > > > > True but what more do you need at the runtime level? > > Well, I can think of one thing I would like, some way for the packages > contained in a JAR file be able to inform the underlying runtime not > only its external dependencies, but also what it provides (or what it > exposes). Due to limitations in the Java visibility/protection rules, > sometimes it is not possible to avoid making implementation API public > because you are forced to declare classes/methods as public if you need > to use them from more than one package. > > Of course, you could just put everything in the same package and use > package protection, but that also defeats the purpose of trying to > structure things into modules. So, for a module to be able to say that I > export package "foo", but not "foo.FooImpl" would be very useful from my > perspective. Then other packages inside the JAR are privy to > implementation APIs, where packages outside the JAR are not. > > I also have lots of interesting ideas about dynamic deployment/updates > too, but I am sure that these things would be extension to the platform > as opposed to implementing a conforming J2SE platform. :-) > > -> richard > >
