Hi community, I've been working on the subject of the build time for James lately.
TL;DR; I'd like to require JDK-11 as the default compiler for James to use the `-release` flag to fasten the build (while still targeting Java 8 for now) and drop animal-sniffer plugin. Long version: James is very modular. I mean, there are more than 200 modules to build because of the hexagonal architecture we implement. Maybe it would make sense to describe a bit this design decision, I don't think it has been done publicly before and implicit decision record is usually a bad idea. The problem is the following: We want James to be able to support various kind of technologies because it's at the same time a standalone mail server, a mail service that you can embed, a set of libraries you can reuse and a mail processing framework. We would like it to be useful at the same time for single user instances and for million users instance. The design decision: Keep domain code clean, that is, not depending on a given technology, so that we can switch non-core-domain modules when we need a new technology. That's basically what Hexagonal Architecture (or Onion Architecture, or Clean Architecture) is all about. Consequence: For each non-core-domain requirements of a given module we introduce an api module (something-api) to describe these requirements. We also provide a contract testsuite in api so that all implementations have (as much as possible) a similar behavior. Then we implement at least two modules for any api: a memory one that uses java datastructure as ArrayList or HashMap and a second (more useful) one using the technology of the day. So any requirements means 3 more projects. That's what led us to a 200+ modules project and a slow build. One thing I found is that using the animal-sniffer maven plugin is kind of slow on James. animal-sniffer is a plugin that checks, when we target java 8, that not only we respect the language specification but we also use only jdk8 APIs. Hopefully, this feature were added in java 9 openjdk compiler with the `-release` flag and it's way faster than animal-sniffer. Then we finally come to my proposal: I'd like to require JDK-11 as the default compiler for James to use the `-release` flag to fasten the build (while still targeting Java 8 for now) and drop animal-sniffer plugin. In the (very near) future, we'll discuss the switch to Java 11 as a runtime platform, too, but it's not the proposal I make here. I do propose a vote to ensure consensus on it: - Answer this mail with "+1" to require jdk-11 as build tool - Answer this mail with "-1" to reject the idea Regards, -- Matthieu Baechler --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: server-dev-unsubscr...@james.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: server-dev-h...@james.apache.org
