Task: build runtime image

[donmendelson]

Enhance the build process to produce a modular runtime image

[donmendelson]

I tried using jlink plugin, but it failed with NPE.

<groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
<artifactId>maven-jlink-plugin</artifactId>
<version>3.0.0-alpha-1</version>

[donmendelson]

Apparently the pre-release jlink plugin does not yet support multi module projects.

[donmendelson]

One of the greatest features of Java has been back-compatibility going back to version 1.01. The Project Jigsaw module system added in Java 9 is major break with the past. It is apparent that tooling in Maven and Eclipse has not caught up with Java 9 even though 10 is current and 11 is imminent.

Module build is still experimental in Gradle as well, but it looks like it may be further along. See https://guides.gradle.org/building-java-9-modules/. Note that Conga uses ServiceLoader as discussed in that article for message encoding plug-ins. Does anyone have experience with this?

[donmendelson]

Wordaround: mvn package copies all dependent modules to a directory for execution. A sample command is provided for client and server.

[donmendelson]

A more popular way to go these days would be to build a Docker image. This can easily be accomplished with a Maven plugin.