After reading this very interesting thread on CJAN/JJAR, here follows my
remarks / comments / ideas ...
I should point out that I really everything that I have read so far. Very
interesting !
In no specific order ...
1) We need to communicate from the minimalist jar on the client side to the
server side repository. More than that we need to call services : dependency
list service, fetch service, news service, ... Why reinvent the wheel ?
There is something already done for that, it is called Web Services ... We
don't have to implement the full web service stack (XML, SOAP, WSDL, UDDI,
...). Just using XML and SOAP would be enough to start with.
a) I can already see Geir's comment on that : the client side jar will be
too big ! First I'm sure that we can fit it all in less than 300 kbytes
which seem reasonable to me. Downloading 17kbytes or 300kbytes is the same
even on a slow modem ... Second, as Peter pointed out, this is a bootstrap
mechanism, which mean you only need to download it once so it is not *that*
important. I understand Geir's point about embedded devices but I don't
think this is what we are focusing on right now, is it ? (Eventually when
SOAP/XML parser will be integrated in the JVM, the size will drop to a few
Kbs ... :) ).
b) Not everyone has a SOAP client on it's computer yet so I would say that
we also have to offer a simple XML interface at first. Like
http://jakarta.apache.org/repository/fetch?file=log4j&version=...... But I
would definitely not like to restrict to only this type of semantic and use
SOAP/ XP (when ready) instead. We can even use Apache SOAP framework ... :)
2) The real goal that I'd like to see for such a project is to replace
Jakarta's way of publishing new releases/ accessing release. I'd like to
view this project as a set of Repository Services and have 2 sets of APIs :
- one for publishing new libraries into the Repository. This could be used
by any individual/group like JUnit, JDOM. It could also be used by GUMP
itself to publish nightly builds and it should be used by Jakarta projects
to release their files.
- one for querying the repository. This would be used by end user using
either Ant or Geir's command line tool. It could also be used by a specific
classloader. It would also be used by the Jakarta web site download pages.
The real challenge is to have a unified way of releasing
libraries/applications for Jakarta (we can broaden the scope later if need
be so that it reaches the size of a CPAN).
3) A nice service that I'd like to see in the set of services is a news
service to which we could ask question like : Give me the list of new
releases for the past 15 days. We can even set up a web page so that user
make their queries online. Then it would be very easy for external news
portal site to gather the list of new releases from Jakarta and aggegate
this information with information from other sites.
A very interesting project in my opinion in which I would be interested to
participate .... :)
Thanks.
Vincent.
