When Jigsaw was released with Java 9, it was the end of a long process - it had been postponed already - and it had to be released. With the coming of Java 11, the latest Long-Term Support, I think it’s a good time to take a snapshot of the state of modularization.
I’ll use the Top 20 Libraries and APIs Java Developer should know as a reference, and check for each of them if the latest version:
- provides an automatic module name
- or has a
module-info
In the first case, the JAR has a stable module name. It’s still an automatic module, but it’s the first step into the module system. In the second case, the JAR is a full-fledged module as it has completely embraced the module system.
| Name | Analyzed version | Module name | Modularized? |
|---|---|---|---|
1.8.0-beta2 |
|
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2.9.8 |
|
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2.8.5 |
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5.3.2 |
|
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2.23.4 |
|
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2.0.0-RC.4 |
|||
3.8.1 |
|
||
3.6.1 |
|||
27.0.1 |
|
||
4.5.6 |
|
||
2.12.0 |
|||
1.4.11.1 |
|||
2.1.1 |
|||
JAXB |
2.3.1 |
|
|
4.0.1 |
|||
2.6.0 |
|||
2.1.1 |
|
||
3.2.0 |
|
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2.5.0 |
|||
5.5.13 |
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2.3 |
|||
4.2 |
|
||
9.2.0 |
|
||
3.1.0 |
|||
1.5 |
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1.11.3 |
|
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1.11 |
|
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3.8.1 |
|||
3.8.1 |
Only two of the libraries above are actually modularized!
That is understandable, since implementing modules in one’s own library is a non-trivial effort.
However, a lot of libraries - about 50% - don’t have an Automatic-Module-Name, even though:
- It costs virtually nothing
- The latest version has been published in 2018 - Java 9 has been released in September 2017
Because of that, it makes it very hard for client applications/frameworks/libraries e.g. Spring to be modularized themselves. That makes me wonder what the future looks like for modules.
| Interestingly enough, despite the lack of module support, a lot of the above libraries are OSGI bundles (e.g. ProtoBuf) |