java - Why project Jigsaw / JPMS?

Question

Java's package management system always seemed simple and effective to me. It is heavily used by the JDK itself. We have been using it to mimic the concept of namespaces and modules.

What is Project Jigsaw (aka Java Platform Module System) trying to fill in?

From the official site:

The goal of this Project is to design and implement a standard module system for the Java SE Platform, and to apply that system to the Platform itself and to the JDK.

Answer 1

Jigsaw and OSGi are trying to solve the same problem: how to allow coarser-grained modules to interact while shielding their internals.

In Jigsaw's case, the coarser-grained modules include Java classes, packages, and their dependencies.

Here's an example: Spring and Hibernate. Both have a dependency on a 3rd party JAR CGLIB, but they use different, incompatible versions of that JAR. What can you do if you rely on the standard JDK? Including the version that Spring wants breaks Hibernate and visa versa.

But, if you have a higher-level model like Jigsaw you can easily manage different versions of a JAR in different modules. Think of them as higher-level packages.

If you build Spring from the GitHub source you'll see it, too. They've redone the framework so it consists of several modules: core, persistence, etc. You can pick and choose the minimal set of module dependencies that your application needs and ignore the rest. It used to be a single Spring JAR, with all the .class files in it.

Update: Five years later - Jigsaw might still have some issues to resolve.