Danny Angus wrote: > Should, perhaps, Jakarta be using our hard fought success with JSPA to propose a JSR >defining an installation API that would address dependancy management in a cohesive >way? > > It seems to me that dependancy handling in Java as a whole, not just here, has been >left to fate rather than engineering, I have installed, on this machine, JDK 1.3 and >1.4 from Sun other developers will also have IBM's JVM installed as well, yet when I >install JBuilder it installs its own JDK as well, and there are other products that >do likewise. To me this is an indication that the extent of dependancy management >problems is so great that sellers of commercial products cannot even reliably assume >compatibility between minor versions of the JDK, let alone third party components. I >would have thought that ought to concern anyone who's livelihood depends upon Java. > Its all very well Java being "platform independant" but it really ought to provide a >framework for dependacy management too, after all it is in effect an operating system >(albeit more of an emulator) and library management should be a service provided by >the os (IMO), and as producers of a range of interdependant products Jakarta is in >dire need of this (again IMHO). >
This is so true that Java needs a real dependency management standard. While I agree that work on a JSR is maybe the way to go on a long run, I think the actual implementation should start regardless of JSR existence. There was a discussion about an enterprise distribution of jakarta and other open-source java technologies some time back on this list that resulted in starting "oed" project on SourceForge [which is pretty much dead at the moment :-( ]. Doing some preliminary research in this direction led me to the same conclusion - Java is an "OS-like" creature and therefore needs a package manager (registry, whatever). I was thinking more along the lines of an RPM-like system. It can still be ant-driven, but main effort should be put into dependency tracking framework. As far as JAR versioning goes, http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.3/docs/guide/extensions/versioning.html can be used, but there is much more. For instance you may want to install documentation or sample applications, etc. together with a package. So just dropping right version of .jar in .../lib/ext may not solve all the problems. I was thinking about packaging similar to what folks at http://www.jpackage.org/ do, but making it in Java. This is a fairly big effort, but AFAIK this is the biggest piece currently missing from the "Java puzzle". -- ~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~- - Andrei (a.k.a. Andrus) Adamchik Home of Cayenne - O/R Persistence Framework http://objectstyle.org/cayenne/ email: andrus-jk at objectstyle dot org -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> For additional commands, e-mail: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
