Smoothness library incompatible as a JBoss Module

[slominskir]

I've been working on packaging the smoothness-weblib as a JBoss Module, which is how to avoid bundling it inside every war file (application) that uses it. Wildfly is designed to run multiple apps together in the same JVM (before days of Docker Compose!) and share libraries, and JBoss modules is how it is done (JBoss Modules was created before days of Java Platform Module System JPMS a.k.a. Jigsaw). The smoothness-weblib actually contains a tag library (TLD file) and apparently those are only "discovered" if inside a war file. There may be a workaround were we duplicate the TLD file inside each war or possibly use the jboss-deployment-structure.xml mechanism, but we also have the problem that the smoothness weblib is also a library of web resources (JSP, CSS, JavaScript, HTML, images), and those may also only be referenced if directly inside a war needing them.

If you do attempt to install smoothness-weblib as a module and then use it you'll see the very unhelpful error when you navigate your web browser to view the first JSP page:

ERROR [io.undertow.request] (default task-1) UT005023: Exception handling request to /smoothness-demo/WEB-INF/views/overview.jsp: org.apache.jasper.JasperException: JBWEB004001: Unable to compile class for JSP
        at [email protected]//org.apache.jasper.JspCompilationContext.compile(JspCompilationContext.java:667)
        at [email protected]//org.apache.jasper.servlet.JspServletWrapper.loadTagFile(JspServletWrapper.java:242)
        at [email protected]//org.apache.jasper.compiler.TagFileProcessor.loadTagFile(TagFileProcessor.java:587)
...
Caused by: java.lang.NullPointerException
        at [email protected]//org.apache.jasper.compiler.TagLibraryInfoImpl.createTagFileInfo(TagLibraryInfoImpl.java:486)
        at [email protected]//org.apache.jasper.compiler.TagLibraryInfoImpl.<init>(TagLibraryInfoImpl.java:198)
        at [email protected]//org.apache.jasper.compiler.Parser.parseTaglibDirective(Parser.java:412)
...

[slominskir]

Punting on this for now. Just package smoothness weblib with each war is fine for now (and the way it's been used for years) and we can revisit later if we want to dump a ton of time into making this work.