As components of the Application Server mature into their own projects, it will become increasingly difficult to manage them as a part of the "jboss" project. They will have their own contributors, releases, components and libraries. Coordinating all of this effort in a single project is unscalable.

All of the existing modules of the AS should be extracted into their own projects. Each project will have its own source repository and will integrate with the AS as an external dependency.

Figure 3.1. Extraction of AS components into their own CVS modules.

Individual projects produce multiple artifacts according to the needs of dependent projects. For instance, JBossCache would produce a standalone artifact for use in lightweight containers. It would also need to produce a SAR with a more extensive dependency set for use in the AS.

The AS project will aggregate its dependencies into multiple distributables (i.e., archived or InstallShield). The AS project will also include the testsuite for integration tests.

The process for extracting projects from modules can be iterative. However, it needs to start at the top of the dependency tree with the Common module and proceed downwards. For example, in order to extract the Remoting project, all of the dependencies above it must be extracted and made available to the Remoting project as external libraries.

Figure 3.2. Example of Module Extraction Process

This order is necessary to avoid circular dependencies.