JBoss modules for a large number of jar dependencies AS

Question

I am trying to figure out how to make my WAR easier by installing JasperReports, Apache POI and other heavy libraries directly in JBoss AS using JBoss Modules .

Jasper now uses many different libraries to create PDF or XLS files, as you can see here . Our templates are quite old, and we are stuck with the old version of jasper 3.7.1, which, of course, uses older versions of libraries, such as shared domains, which are already present in the JBoss AS 7.1.1 modules.

How can I create one “large” module that will contain all the banks used by Jasper and save other parts of the application using new modules?

Putting all the banks in separate directories seems to be so much work without guaranteed success, can we put everything in one module without creating the same package directories?

Answer 1

We recently started with JBoss modules and wrote a small plugin for Maven that generates module folders with module.xmls based on XML descriptors. The plugin is called smartics-jboss-modules-maven-plugin , and you will find more information on this in the project blog .

We just started working with it, but it already greatly simplifies the synchronization process between POM and module.xml (plus the directory structure) for our projects.

The disadvantage of this approach is that you need to examine the optional XML descriptor and configure the optional Maven plugin.

If you want to try, the plugin is licensed under the Apache License 2.0.

Answer 2

Creating JBoss modules for external libraries can be automated via maven, as explained in another answer here on SO. The author published the GitHub project . This can reduce the pain of managing many transitive dependencies.