Modular Programming in Java 9

Pattern 8 - Use tooling for version control

As discussed in Chapter 3, Handling Inter-Module Dependencies, one important feature of most module systems is conspicuously absent in Java modularity--that of module versioning and version management. If you've dealt with build and packaging tools in the Java ecosystem such as Maven and Gradle, you might have come across the fact that all their library artifacts have version numbers associated with them. With Maven or Gradle, when you establish a dependency on another artifact or library module (and I'm using the word module loosely here), you not only have to specify its name and coordinates, you also have to specify its version number.

With Java module dependencies, there's no way to specify ...