Modular Programming in Java 9

Using jdeps to create module descriptors

Once you start breaking down your library JARs into modules, depending on the size of your library, you may have a lot of work to do. It's not straightforward to identify which modules you'll need to require and which you'll need to export. The jdeps tool has another trick up its sleeve. It can look at your JAR files and automatically come up with module descriptors for you to use.

The syntax is as follows:

$ jdeps --generate-module-info <output-location> <path-to-jars>

Let's try this for the commons-collections JAR file:

$ jdeps --generate-module-info out lib/commons-collections4-4.1.jar

The output should look like this:

writing to out/commons.collections4/module-info.java

As you can see, jdeps has ...