Ricky Clarkson wrote:
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
Yes, this IVY does sound like it is related, but not quite the same thing. IVY sounds like a component repository that you can use in your own projects to describe your project's dependency on other projects. In this case, IVY performs a build-time activity.
It appears that IVY allows you to specify dependencies on other JAR files and then ensures that these JAR files are present when you build. Without investigating it explicitly, how would IVY allow you to describe what is exported from each of the individual JAR files (i.e., their public API) and how would it enforce this visibility at run time?
I actually have a similar tool (but much simpler) to IVY, called OBR, that performs deployment-time dependency management for package dependencies for OSGi bundles. OBR is interesting, but it would not be as interesting without the OSGi run time underneath of it.
So while tools like IVY and OBR are related to the issue, they are just a part of it.
-> richard
