Hello
Le 2024-02-06 à 16 h 11, Hunter C Payne a écrit :
Nobody wants Jigsaw and the API improvements aren't enough to get
people to upgrade.
I cannot debate on whether a small minority, or a big minority, or a
majority of developers want JPMS (a.k.a. Jigsaw), because I have no data
for backing my claims. However, I have not see someone else providing
reliable data (e.g. a serious study) for backing opposite claims
neither. But one thing sure is that it is not "nobody wants Jigsaw",
since at least two persons have expressed interest on this mailing list.
Opinions based on personal experience are indicative of a market segment
at best. Some peoples may base their opinions on their experience with
Google or Amazon. My own personal experience is with space agencies,
meteorological/oceanographical agencies, international standardization
organizations, etc. They have different consumers, different
constraints, different priorities. No consumer said directly "I want
JPMS". But they do said "I want faster / more secure / more reliable
software", and JPMS is one tool among others for achieving those goals.
Not a panacea, but a significant help. For example, JPMS improves
security by blocking at the JVM level all unauthorized accesses to
internal packages. I'm not aware of any other non-deprecated solution
providing this security at the JVM level. The few times that I spoke to
peoples working in defence, they were very receptive to that kind of
argument.
My opinion is that as long as JPMS is so difficult to use in a
non-trivial Maven or Gradle project, we cannot know if a relatively low
adoption is really because of a lack of interest. Even if some
communities are still not interested by JPMS no matter how easy, no
personal experience can be generalized to the whole market. If a tool
improving software security exists, I think it is a responsibility to
make that tool accessible to developers who want to use it (again, I
know that JPMS is not a panacea. But it helps).
On the larger topic of API improvements in newer Java versions, Panama
(coming final in Java 22) is a big feature given the important native
libraries out there (e.g. for Artificial Intelligence). It may be of
interest to Maven itself, e.g. for accessing C/C++ or Python build tools.
Martin
