Hi Guys, Actually I think we can keep the WAR format but just make it a "skinny" WAR (ie without any JARs just resources). I've started working on this. Should be ready later today. Another idea (but not for now) would be to keep the platform WAR but make it empty *except* for the Extension Manager feature (and thus its deps too), which will in the future allow the bootstrap all the rest. Note that doing this will not fix the maven deps issue we have. That said I personally would prefer the following: * Have no working platform distribution * Distribute an empty XE (with just the extension manager) * When XE starts the first time, propose different "flavors" (public documentation web site, intranet, empty, etc) and install automatically all required extensions With this vision there's no need for a minimal distribution version in platform and platform can remain a repo of libraries/resources. Thanks -Vincent On Apr 28, 2011, at 11:03 AM, Vincent Massol wrote:
Hi devs,
We've decided with the new reorg following the move to github that xwiki-platform was a collection of libraries/resources that work together (and released together) that can be used by top level projects (XE for example) to build a running application.
We've also implicitly decided that we didn't have a notion of "core" and that all libs/resources were at the same level (all in xwiki-platform-core/).
As a consequence it doesn't really make sense for xwiki-platform to release a WAR since we wouldn't know what to put in it (since there's no notion of core). Right now it's a bit a mess with no logic (for example the watchlist is not in it but other modules are).
I'm thus proposing to transform xwiki-platform-web in 1 or 2 modules instead (resources and templates) that generate a zip/jar that only contains resources, and that it's up to the top level projects (like XE) to build their own distribution by pulling in whatever libs/resources they want from xwiki-platform.
Note that this solves an issue we currently have with Maven. If a top level project depends on the platform web but also on other modules that transitively depend on artifacts bundled in the platform war then we can get duplicate jars in the resulting war since maven sees the war artifact as a blob and doesn't know about the dependencies that were included in it.
Here's my +1
Thanks -Vincent