One more reason to support the proposal for fully osgifying the JDK in Java 8. See
http://dev.eclipse.org/blogs/mike/2010/10/14/java-8-vote/
The monolithic nature of the JDK/JRE itself is a significant obstacle to building truly modular Java applications.
Sun's homegrown solutions for extensions like lib/ext and lib/endorsed and META-INF/services could all be superseded and simplified by OSGi mechanisms.
If the JRE were fully OSGified, then the natural version number for JRE packages would of course be the JRE version, like 1.6.0.22.
The interesting question is where to draw the boundary of the JRE: If OSGi were used as the foundation for a modular JRE, then the JRE itself should only contain the OSGi core and the minimal subset of today's JRE packages required for an OSGi core implementation.
The rest of the JRE should be split into something like 30 to 50 optional bundles, each of which might have its own versioning scheme.
Then the user could simple upgrade the JAXB or JAXP bundles at their own discretion.
Yeah, I'm really leaving the scope of this thread, so I'd better stop here...
Best regards,
Harald
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