Re: [jakarta.ee-community] A Composable Platform Over Profiles

[Bill Shannon <bill.shannon@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Jason Greene wrote on 05/ 1/18 07:01 PM:
> 
>> On May 1, 2018, at 2:36 PM, Bill Shannon <bill.shannon@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>> 
>> Jason Greene wrote on 05/ 1/18 11:11 AM:> I argue that a better approach
>> would be to define the platform as a palette
>>> of composable standards[1], where profiles define only what must be
>>> available for a developer to choose from, and only limit the version of a
>>> given standard to the minimum that must be provided[2].
>> 
>> The former is exactly where we intended to head for Java EE 9. Defining the
>> requirements for composability and getting every vendor to agree to them
>> and every product to implement them would be a challenge.
> 
> One thing that helps here is that granting implementations flexibility
> doesn’t mean we have to force everyone to move to such an approach (at least
> initially). IMO, It’s perfectly reasonable to allow a vendor to ship a
> traditional full profile only distribution if they choose to do so.

Some amount of flexibility is required if you truly want to enable multiple
independent implementations, but if you go too far you lose application
portability because every product is just too different even though they
all meet the spec.

But yes, my expectation is that we would need to phase in some of these
modularity requirements over time to give vendors a chance to adapt their
implementations.