Light-weight Modularity: Facility ClassLoader

[laforge49]

Light-weight Modularity: Facility ClassLoader

[laforge49]

We will also need to create a test module or 3 to test this.

[laforge49]

Looking at using https://github.com/kamranzafar/JCL

The first issue is minor. It uses log4j. Fortunately there is a bridge module we can use for it to work with slf4j: http://www.slf4j.org/legacy.html

The second problem is class loading order. Fortunately JCL is configurable.

The third problem is that a facility class loader must support multiple parent class loaders, as a facility can depend on more than one other facility. This can be handled by wrapping the jcl class loader in the facility class loader, using the jcl class loader only when none of the facilities it depends on have the required class.

This will save a lot of work Sebastien. And it will result in a far more feature-rich capability than we would otherwise have. :-)

[skunkiferous]

If, in the future, you wanted to move to a more dynamic system, where artifacts are downloaded on demand, I recommend having a look at http://www.eclipse.org/proposals/technology.aether/ which allows makes different repository technologies "look the same".

[laforge49]

Production systems rarely benefit from dynamic changes to dependencies. So
loading from dependencies from other sources should likely be "out-of-band".

[laforge49]

moved to JActor-Modules