This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Java Buzz by Norman Richards. Original Post: Another JBoss UCL rant Feed Title: Orb [norman richards] Feed URL: http://members.capmac.org/~orb/blog.cgi/tech/java?flav=rss Feed Description: Monkey number 312,978,199 Latest Java Buzz Posts Latest Java Buzz Posts by Norman Richards Latest Posts From Orb [norman richards]

I ranted about the JBoss UCL a couple of months back and through the magic of referer logs, I discovered a thread on the JBoss forums talking about the same thing. I'm so glad to see I'm not the only one who feels that the Unified Class Loader is horribly broken.

I'm not convinced that anyone outside of the JBoss group thinks the UCL is good or feels it helps them, but on the off chance you haven't felt the pain of the UCL and are curious what the fuss is about, then the above thread is a good place to start. There are some great comments at the end of the thread.

The big problem seems to be that the J2EE spec doesn't dictate how classloading needs to take place. The entire J2EE community, except JBoss, have settled on some fairly standard practices that make sense and avoid confusion. The JBoss UCL is different and confusing. With the UCL you can't just deploy your components in isolation and be confident everything will work. You have to worry about every class file in every application.

I give JBoss a lot of credit for innovating in the J2EE arena, but not all innovation produces good results. The use of JMX as a kernel is good. The interceptor architecture is nice. But the UCL is a failure. Please JBoss guys, can we just move on?