Dear Glassfish Administration,
The usage of the "Maven2" (MVN2) tool is quite common to wide areas of
the global software industry and amateur programmers community. A core
idea of MVN2 is to support automatic downloads of dependencies (i. e.
libraries needed for compilation) from a central repository
(
http://repo1.maven.org).
JEE 5 programmers need to compile their components and modules by using
JEE 5 APIs (javax.ejb and other packages). To be able to do so, they
need to have a JAR file containing the JEE 5 API interfaces. Currently
there are only two ways to obtain these. Either downloading the JEE 5
SDK, or downloading Glassfish. Both implies lenghty, manual downloads.
If the source code shall be provided to others, that others must also do
that download since distribution of the Sun JARs is not allowed. This is
a major drawback of current JEE 5 distribution concepts.
JEE 5 programmers wish to be able to just add a dependency to the JEE
API into their pom.xml MVN2 descriptor, which would allow everyone to
get the needed JARs downloaded automatically, without any need to do
manual downloads of complete JEE implementations.
Unfortunately the central MVN2 repository (see URL above) only provides
J2EE 1.4 compliant downloads, while JEE 5 is missing. Now with Glassfish
providing a JEE 5 compliant implementation on an open source basis, it
should be possible to provide the API JARs (JEE 5 interfaces only, not
the complete Glassfish implementation) to the above-mentioned central
repository.
While it actually would be enough to have one single JEE 5 JAR
containing all libraries, it would certainly beneficial to instead have
a JEE pom.xml that in turn is nothing else but a collection of
dependencies, which in turn automate the downloading of the EJB, JMS,
JCA and other JARs contained in JEE. This would allow the programmer to
only contain the needed downloads for improved speed, or in the case he
is not developing a JEE application but only e. g. likes to use the JTA
API in a standalone application.
This would be a great help to all those JEE 5 users, since it relieves
from manually downloading the complete JEE SDK manually to obtain a copy
of the EJB and other APIs needed for compilation of JEE 5 components and
modules.
I want to ask the Glassfish administration to provide the needed APIs in
form of MVN2 compliant projects on the above-mentioned central
repository. The work needed is a few hours only, but thousands of
programmers will have a large benefit.
Regards
Markus KARG