We have a number of specs that are now defining requirements along the
lines of "when running in an environment that supports XYZ specification,
you must do blah blah blah." However, there is no common way to determine
if an environment actually supports XYZ.
In a modular runtime, we could get notified when a specific service was
registered in a service registry. Maybe someday we will get there, but in
the meantime, is there some common pattern we can use to declare that XYZ
is available in the environment? Possibilities that come to mind are well
known JNDI name strings or system properties. A more sophisticated pattern
would be to bind an SPI to the JNDI name that provided state (i.e. the
service is initializing or ready to receive requests). Anyway, I think it
would be nice if we could come up with a more portable way to deal with
these "optional" behaviors defined in the specs.
Thanks,
Jim Knutson
WebSphere Java EE Architect