Recently, I was preparing a connection checker for Deployit’s powerful remote execution framework Overthere. To make the checker, as compact as possible, I put together a jar-with-deps¹ for distribution.
Tests and trial runs from the IDE worked, so I was expected the dry-run of the distribution to be a quick formality. Instead: boom!
Turns out that one of the libraries used by Overthere, TrueZIP – or indeed any code that utilizes Java’s SPI mechanism² – doesn’t play well with the jar-with-deps idea. Read more

Implementing a Java SPI isn’t a particularly 2011 experience¹. Creating a correctly-named text file in META-INF/services, making sure it is correctly packaged and remembering to keep it up to date when you refactor is sufficiently annoying and error-prone that there are at least a couple of utils that aim to make this easier.

At XebiaLabs, however, we’re not just the implementors of our plugin SPI. We also write the deployment engine that consumes these plugins. And unfortunately, there isn’t much out there to help you read, load and verify services. Hence MultiSPI.
 Read more