JBoss ShrinkWrap

Question

In watching some video tutorials on JBoss's Arquillian, I stumbled across another project of theirs called ShrinkWrap (because Arquillian uses it).

After spending some time on their project page, I can't seem to find concrete answers to a few questions, and it seems to be a pretty new (immature) project that doesn't have a big dev community behind it. Specifically:

• Is the purpose of ShrinkWrap to create in-memory JARs, WARs and EARs? If so, why would I want to do that? If not, what is the purpose of ShrinkWrap and what problem does it solve?
• Does ShrinkWrap touch the file system (does the JAR actually get created on disk, or is it truly 100% in-memory)? If not, then what's the value of an in-memory archive?

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

One of the advantages of having an in-memory JAR is that you are able to deploy it to a remote JBossAS instance without even having to write it to a file. When you don't write a file, you don't make up silly temp JAR file names, then remember to delete them later, etc..

General point is to have as less dependencies and side-effects on build-environment as possible.

It may seem that the project is immature, but it's not true. The development is very active, and the community is wide, people coming not only from JBoss world, but also from all the major app-server communities!