In Relation To

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I had the pleasure of gabbing about JBoss Modules a couple times at the Red Hat/JBoss booth at JavaOne this year, drawing frankly more interest than I thought I'd see. As a part of my talk (the video for which you can download here [well, soon anyway]), I chatted a bit about what the future may hold for Java in terms of modular runtime, modular development lifecycle, and distribution management. Some things seem certain - that the current paradigm won't hold, for example - and some are very uncertain - such as what, if anything, will replace Maven as the ubiquitous modular build/distribution system of the future.

Today Oracle's Mark Reinhold published the requirements for comment a public draft of the Java Module system being proposed for inclusion into the Java SE 8 platform. The requirements as given are fairly high-level yet comprehensive, and many of these requirements align well with the goals and specifications of our own JBoss Modules system, which is not only a strong validation of our own design but also what I think is a good sign for the future of the Java platform.

I will be giving two talks about JBoss Modules next week at JUDCon 2011 (Boston) - the first on Monday at 9:00 am (ouch, I know) about JBoss Modules in JBoss AS 7, and the second on Monday at 2:30pm about using JBoss Modules itself. Also, I'll be around for most of the week (including during JBoss World/Red Hat Summit), and will be willing to Chat about Stuff when I can.

JBoss Marshalling 1.3.0 is about to land! The ninth (and probably final) release candidate for 1.3.0 has been made available for download. New in this version:

It was almost a year ago that Mark Reinhold (one of the top Java engineers over at Sun/Oracle) announced The classpath is dead! at JavaONE, accompanied by a series of blog posts like this one, proclaiming that the future of Java is a modular one. In the mean time, the JDK 7 timeline has slipped dramatically and we may not see modules in Java proper until 2012 or later. All the while, the folks on JSR 294 have stalled, started, and stalled again, slowly inching their way towards a tightly-Java-integrated modularization standard, possibly requiring significant language, bytecode, and packaging changes to support it.