SCA Archive

[ant elder <an...@gmail.com>]

On the IRC chat yesterday when we discussed how to pick up the dependencies
for extensions and we talked about having something like an SCA Archive that
works in a similar way to web app WAR files with classes and lib
directories. The extension code could go in the classes or lib directories
and any dependency jars go in the lib directory. These could be used for
both Tuscany extensions and regular application composites.

Something like:

META-INF/default.scdl
classes/
lib/

A war file has the classes and lib directories within a WEB-INF directory so
would an SCA archive need the same? Eg:

SCA-INF/default.scdl
SCA-INF/classes
SCA-INF/lib

What would the file extension be for an SCA archive? Suggestions on IRC were
SAR, SCAR or SCAB. Some of those are already used by other systems and scab
doesn't sound very flattering so any other suggestions?

These archives could be made to work as a single archive file or as an
exploded directory structure. So for example with the way the launchers work
now there is an extension directory so you could have:

extension/javascript.sar

or:

extension/javascript/META-INF/default.scdl
extension/javascript/classes/org/apache/tuscany/continer/javascript/JavaScriptComponent.class
extension/javascript/classes/org/apache/tuscany/continer/javascript/....class
extension/javascript/lib/rhino.jar
extension/javascript/lib/xbean.jar

Any comments or improvements on this? I'll leave it for a few days to get
comments then based on those may have a go at implementing something like
this.

   ...ant