[armedbear-devel] JAR file support patches

[Axel Rauschmayer]

>> Incidentally, we may be able to autodiscover .asd files by scanning
>> the classpath, and suitably update asdf:*central-registry*.
> 
> We first need to agree on a convention to wedge the concept of Pathname 
> into CLASSPATH.  I now support your earlier proposal to keep the two 
> separate, as it makes more sense.  And I'd like to get the "jar:" part 
> of my changes into the trunk, and tested for a bit before introducing 
> another the next step.  Right now, wildcards (and DIRECTORY) don't work 
> inside JARs which would be the first step to autodiscovery.


With Java resources, one is always warned against using the classpath that way. Looking for a particular path is possible, but listing paths (or files) not. It might be safer to introduce an additional concept. This could be an explicit list of Java resource paths or a new kind of ASDF classpath.

Here is how Spring does auto-detection:
http://static.springsource.org/spring/docs/2.5.x/reference/beans.html#beans-scanning-autodetection

Here is more information from Sun on finding classes:
http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.5.0/docs/tooldocs/findingclasses.html

-- 
Axel.Rauschmayer at ifi.lmu.de
http://www.pst.ifi.lmu.de/~rauschma/