Hi, in the "Alternatives to automatic modules..." thread David mentioned ModiTect [1], a tool I've been working on for creating/adding Java 9 module descriptors. I thought I'd share some more details, hoping it's helpful to others for moving their apps and libraries to Jigsaw.
The tool currently does two things for you: * Generate module-info.java descriptors for given JARs; this is using jdeps under the hood, but it comes with some additional functionality on top: - Considers the dependencies of the JAR as input (as expressed in its pom.xml) - Allows to filter the exported packages - Adds uses clauses (by scanning for ServiceLoader usages; if load() is invoked with a class literal, the required uses clause can be derived from the byte code; Doing a quick search on GitHub, I found this to be the case most of the time when the service loader is used) * Compile and add module-info descriptors (written by hand or generated in the step before) to existing JARs, collecting them in a directory of modules, to be used as a module path As an example [2], I've used this to convert Bean Validation and Hibernate Validator as well as Undertow and their dependencies into proper Jigsaw modules without too much effort. Apart from the discussed naming issues, not being able to use automatic modules in modular runtime images is their biggest shortcoming to me. Adding the required descriptors in a semi-automated manner as described above solved this issue reasonably well for me. A related functionality I'd envision as very useful is the ability to update existing module descriptors, e.g. to update transitive requirements to use an equivalent module with a different name. Aligning conflicting dependencies to multiple variants of the JPA API (e.g. by Hibernate and EclipseLink) would be an example for this. --Gunnar [1] https://github.com/moditect/moditect [2] https://github.com/moditect/moditect/tree/master/integrationtest
