Bug 170518

Description David Williams 2007-01-15 14:26:02 EST

I thought of this enhancement request as a result of the discussion in bug 160739.

It seems to me the "legality" of what's API in some EE's might be a similar to a user preference. For example, someone may want to use Java 5, but they still do not want to pull in any XML dependencies. Some JRE vendors make this easier or harder to do by actually packaging the "system" libraries in different jars. For example, in IBM's JRE, they have an xml.jar which could, in principle, be intentionally left out of some runtime environments. 

Another use-case might be that someone wants to develop "headless" apps, so would want to to exclude all the UI related API's (such as the top layer in the diagram at the beginning of http://java.sun.com/javase/6/docs/. 

While these cases can technically be accomplished now, by specifying over-ride access rules on a project by project bases this is hard since: 

1. needs to be done on a project-by-project bases, and no way for user to create a custom EE (well, suppose they could with plugin extension points?). 

2. There is no easy way to specify "groups" of API's, but has to be done package by package. 


While I don't see this has a huge need or priority, thought I'd take the time to write it down, so perhaps it could be kept in mind, and hopefully design decisions no rule out the future possibility.