Macro / Inlineable

[oNyx]

You can unpack without java. The jdk comes with a native unpack program, which can be used by installers. The jre installer uses this technique (afaict).

http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.5.0/docs/tooldocs/share/unpack200.html

You could use these cmd line parameters:

pack200 --no-gzip --modification-time=latest --effort=9 --deflate-hint="false" --strip-debug --unknown-attribute=strip foo.jar.pack foo.jar

http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.5.0/docs/tooldocs/share/pack200.html

And instead of gzip you could use a superior compression scheme like lzma. Over at 7.zip.org you can get the lzma sdk, which comes with a cmd line compressor/decompressor.

However, the best option would be using an installer, which already does that like NSIS.

With lzma the JEmu2 jar gets down to 201,947 Bytes (-fb255) and the rt.jar gets even down to 3,543,040 Bytes *gasp*

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Uhm yea... basically what Cas said. LZMA ftw!

[princec]

Readers may like to note the difference in download size between the Mac OS version of Ultratron (which is more or less just the pure java 1.4 jars needed to play the game in a zip) and the Win32 version of Ultratron (which also contains an entire, er, Puppygames Java Runtime. Possibly)

Cas

[swpalmer]

Though we also have the ability to package a linux installer (without VM) for a "remote mode" version of our application.  It's essentially the UI to the real app that talks to a server via TCP instead of to a local process via JNI.

And everyone here HATEs doing installers  (because all Installers seem to be painful to deal with), so it's not like we want to do it all over again just to save some bytes in the download...  well I want to, so long as it isn't me doing it

Can I pack/unpack the JARs from a JRE install without hosing anything? (e.g. they are signed, right?)

That also means if Sun adds a new JAR to the mix in Java 6, then I have to tweak everything all over again or have some obscure bug because a class is missing and it isn't found until some weird user tries something dumb.

I think this is really a job for the Install Anywhere folks.