[MISC] [MOBY-dev] Java developers, let's talk together

[Paul Gordon]

People will probably disagree with me here, because it creates a little 
more work for the developers,
but can't we all at least try to use the same version of Axis for 
example?  When you want to write new code,
you can see if there's an acceptable version of the lib of interest 
already committed, and if you absolutely must
use a newer version that is not backward compatible, you can put it in a 
project specific lib directory? 

Later, you can try to convince people that they should update their 
code, or place the old lib in their project-specific
lib directory.  e.g. "Hey!  All Java developers!  Get off your asses and 
use Axis 1.1 instead of the crappy
Axis 1.0 which doesn't cache the non-existence of deserialization helper 
classes and causes thousands of
HTTP requests/disk accesses while running SOAP services!".  There are a 
lot more people contributing to
BioPerl, and they all use the same libraries, we Java programmers can't 
let them show us up :-)

>>   And I will continue, especially with the most important topic, pointed
>>out by Paul G., how to make sure that users of Java libraries always know
>>what put on their claspath when they use several libraries from several
>>authors. I have to sleep on that... (because put everything
>>third-party libs into one shared directory can lead to the versioning
>>problem).
>>    
>>
>
>I missed this in the original message, but it happened to catch my eye here.
>FWIW, we had a similar problem in ISYS, where independent components each 
>came with their own set of classes (possibly different versions of the same 
>libs) and the system itself had its own set. 
>
>  
>
>The solution we used involved custom classloaders (which I have since read 
>officially qualifies one as a master of black magic);
>
Hee hee, I wrote my own class loader too, but so that I could 
automatically create applet JARs
with only the classes I needed for the app instead of all of the classes 
in the third party packages
I was using.  When is the next Black Magic Circle clandestine meeting? :-)