Service Provider mechanism and javax.imageio.spi.ServiceRegistry

Hi,

Looking for a lightweight plugin mechanism I stumbled on the jar
service provider spec [1]. The example there contains

  Iterator ps = Service.providers(CharCodec.class);

Without indicating what the "Service" class is.

The javax.imageio.spi.ServiceRegistry [2] can be used to load services
using this mechanism, and it's part of the JDK API so using it as a
general-purpose utility should be ok.

But it feels a bit weird to have this in javax.imageio.spi, is there a
better alternative?

-Bertrand

[1] http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.4.2/docs/guide/jar/jar.html#Service%20Provider
[2] http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.4.2/docs/api/javax/imageio/spi/ServiceRegistry.html

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