Java Modules

So I might not be giving a shit and doing it for fun but I'm still looking into it at work.

After a couple of days of experiments and quite a bit of hacking i've taken most of the libraries I have and re-combined them into a set of modules. Ostensibly the modules are grouped by functionality but I also moved a few bits and pieces around for dependency reasons.

One handy thing is the module-info (along with netbeans) lets you quickly determine dependencies between modules, so for example when I wanted to remove java.desktop and javafx from a library I could easily find the usages. It has made the library slightly more difficult to use because i've moved some methods to static functions (and these functions are used a lot in my prototype code so there's a lot of no-benefit fixing to be done to port it) but it seems like a reasonable compromise for the first cut. There may be other approaches using interfaces or subclasses too, although I tend to think that falls into over-engineering.

Spi

One of the biggest benefits is the service provider mechanism that enables pluggability by just including modules the path. It's something I should've looked into earlier rather than the messy ad-hoc stuff i've been doing but I guess things get done eventually.

I've probably not done a good job with it yet either but it's a start and easy to modify. There should be a couple of other places I can take advantage of it as well.

Redesign

I'm also mid-way through cleaning out a lot of stuff - cut and paste, newer-better implementations, or just experiments that take too much code and are rarely used.

I had a lot of stream processing experiements which just ended up being over-engineered. For example I tried experimenting with using streams and a Collector to calculate more than just min/sum/max, instead calculating multi-dimensional statistics (i.e. all at once) on multi-dimensional data (e.g. image channels). So I came up with a set of classes (1 to 4 dimensions), collector factories, and so on - it's hundreds of lines of code (and a lot of bytecode) and I think I only use it in one or two places in non-performance critical code. So it's going in the bin and if i do decide to replace it I think I can get by with at most a single class and a few factory methods.

The NotAnywhereZone

Whilst looking for some info on netbeans+cvs I tried finding my own posts, and it seems this whole site has effectively vanished from the internet. Well with a specific search you can still find blog posts on google, but not using the date-ranges (maybe the date headers are wrong here). All you can find on duckduckgo is the site root page.

So if you're reading this, congratulations on not being a spider bot!