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I would like to move the OraclePlatform classes from the Oracle Extensions bundle to Core. Since the platform classes have a dependency on the Oracle driver, this would mean changing their implementation to add reflection. The reason I would like to do this is because of the hard dependency on the OraclePlatform classes in the Extension bundle. On WAS Liberty (an OSGI environment) these hard dependencies cannot be satisfied during bundle loading as we do not ship JDBC drivers. If the dependencies were removed through reflection, then the platform classes could move to Core and we could have Liberty users simply add their Oracle drivers as shared libraries. There is a slight performance hit from using reflection and I believe EclipseLink has had a history of removing reflection from the code rather than add it.
One drawback I see here apart from possible performance penalty is that refactoring/code search and similar stuff will be hard to use and error prone if/when done. Proper way to fix this would be to document how to repackage Oracle JDBC driver, possibly with additional dependencies, as an OSGi bundle and how to properly install such bundle into Liberte. Note that all dependencies from org.eclipse.persistence.oracle to packages available in Oracle JDBC driver are declared as optional.
Unfortunately, I do not think that repackaging the Oracle jdbc driver would be a fix in Liberty. We currently don't ship the Oracle jdbc driver with Liberty and it doesn't look like we want to. It may be possible for a customer to write a Liberty user feature and provide their own Oracle driver bundle in order to satisfy the CNF, but this would introduce a regression for existing users who would need to create that configuration. A much simpler solution would be to move the platform classes to "org.eclipse.persistence.platform.database" and have them use reflection.
The Eclipselink project has moved to Github: https://github.com/eclipse-ee4j/eclipselink
