Extending our injection capabilities to "add-ons" such as jsf and jaxws

[David Jencks <da...@yahoo.com>]

There are the main javaee module types (web, ejb, client, etc) and  
then there are additional things that go into one of these that also  
have annotations that indicate injection, such as JSF and jaxws.   
Just as with the main module types, we can divide the annotation  
processing work into two phases:

1 identifying the classes to search for (additional) annotations
2 scanning each of these classes for the additional annotations that  
indicate something needs to be injected.  In general this will result  
in some representation of the annotations ending up in xml.
3 actually injecting stuff at runtime.

I made a suggestion for (3) in an earlier email today so I won't  
discuss that further here.

(2) can be covered by our existing NamingBuilders.

That leaves (1).  Identifying the classes is not really a problem,  
but how to plug this identification into our deployment framework is  
a little less clear.  I think that all the extension types go into  
web modules (can ejb web services be identified solely by  
annotations?).  I see 2 choices:

a. the extension module shares a ClassFinder with the enclosing (web)  
module, in which case all the injection annoations found in (2) will  
be in one big set, probably shared among 2 or 3 classes that do the  
injecting.

b. each extension module has a separate ClassFinder, also separate  
from the enclosing modules' ClassFinder.  This _might_ work better  
for ejbs and would make constructing the classfinder easier, since  
each module can simply figure out its classes and proceed without  
reference to any other submodule or parent module.

In either case having the submodule deployer be a  
ModuleBuilderExtension seems reasonable to me: with choice (b) it  
needs little interaction with  the parent module.  I'm not sure if it  
would be useful but we might want to create additional Module  
subclasses to  track information for the submodules.  It may be that  
all the work happens in addGBeans and that an extra module would have  
nothing to do.

Comments?

thanks
david jencks