On Aug 21, 2006, at 1:31 PM, Dain Sundstrom wrote:
Why the separation between resources and classes. Don't we need to add both to the class loader anyway? I'm curious when this differentiation is important.
From the deployers perspective, they just need to get added to the classpath... so there probably is not much difference there...
I think using URLs instead of files, is going to be very difficult. We had tons of problems dealing with paths containing spaces and urls. IIRC we had to encode and decode URLs all the time. Also, some deployers need to scan the directories. For example, the RAR deployer needs to add all jar files in the archive/ directory to the class path. In Jee5 ear files we need to scan for all nested modules.
Ya maybe... I was just thinking about deploying from things other than files, like an http:// address or nested jar, or some other custom protocol. Using URL allows flexibility by abstraction... where using File binds you to files, since we have no way to augment them.
I wish that java.io.File was a more extensible abstraction... like VFS FileObject or something...
--jason
