On May 13, 2014, at 4:40 PM, Anthony Fryer <apfr...@hotmail.com> wrote:
> I'm interested in the "EARs and complex packaging sucks" particularly in > relation to JCA resource adapters,which can only be packaged in an EAR > according to the standards today, even though TomEE supports deploying it in > a WAR file. Any chance of getting that to be part of the standard? That > seems to be a big missing part of the collapsed EAR concept. Keen observation :) I tried to get that into Java EE 6 when we added the EJBs in .WARs feature (based on Collapsed EAR success). We did that work in the EJB spec as part of EJB 3.1 rather than officially in EE 6. The same approach was taken on pushing for Embeddable containers, was also done in EJB 3.1. Getting both concepts to be EE-wide rather than just EJB-specific is what motivated me to join the EE expert group. Ultimately, there wasn't enough confidence (at that time) to do that. I didn't push as I was fairly confident that simply introducing these concepts even at a smaller scope was a huge step forward and effectively "cracked the nut" -- once people came to expect them and like them it would only be a matter of time. Mind you this was 2009. We've come pretty far since then. As is typically the case, the changes we enjoy now were seeded quite a while ago. We didn't take anymore steps towards more embeddability in Java EE 7, but we did get some work done with regards to connector. Modernizing connectors and getting people to want them and actually write them is in my mind a precursor to getting anyone to accept the idea that these could be included in a webapp. More seeding. The connector modernization made it in, but we need more connector authors out there and more evangelism. Odds are pretty good for Java 8 that will see more embeddability and perhaps more simplified packing. I seem to be alone so far, but I've come to not really enjoy the .war file for the reason it doesn't work on a plain jvm classpath. It seems like we got it backwards. The classes are nested and the content is at the top. Were we to reverse it, we would solve a whole host of problems. -- David Blevins http://twitter.com/dblevins http://www.tomitribe.com
