RE: EARs and Jars continued

Dan, I'm not going to reply at length yet because you've brought a lot to
the table here and I need to consider some of it carefully.  I'm just going
to make one 50,000 foot observation, and then get on with trying to
implement what you've shown us here.


  Hi Joe,

  I understand the problem that you don't want to have copies of these
"utility" JAR files associated with each Enterprise Application that you
have.  This is a waste of time and effort to maintain all of these copies.
So it seems logical to want support for shared JAR files on a network drive.
This would solve the sharing problem but it introduces another annoying team
problem.  All developers would have to individually ensure that they had the
same mapping of the network drive so that the JAR files could be resolved.
It has been our experience that having absolute paths serialized out in any
meta-data for these projects typically will cause problems for other
developers when they load it from the repository.
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I understand your issue with absolute paths and team development
environments (because this same question comes into play for deployment to
multiple customer sites).  At the same time, I still think something needs
to be done here.  It's almost as if we need a globally defined namespace for
JAR files, with a server sort of like an LDAP for JARs.  That way, you can
simply specify the JAR and the range of versions supported, and the tool, be
it IDE or packager or installer, determines the location of the appropriate
JAR for your site.  But that's another issue for another day.



One enhancement to this design would be the ability to have multiple binary
JAR files within one Java project that can be shared as a group of "utility"
JARs within different EARs.  This would give you more control over the
granularity of the shared JAR files because you may have three JAR files
that always go together so you don't really want to create three separate
projects for them.  There are some technical issues with this request
because now we need to detect when JAR files are added or removed from the
Java project and ensure that they are available to other modules within the
EAR.

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This looks very good.  Let me see if I can get it working in my environment
and see what happens.

Joe