[jsword-devel] private JRE, Harmony, RCP, pack200 etc

[Zhaojun Li(李召军)]

Hi,

I found that distributing java application anoying because it needs
JRE on users desktop. We have no control on what on users' system.

One solution is to distribute a private JRE with our application. JRE
5 and 6 are all too big. According to Sun, we have to distribute many
jars that not needed at all in order to comply with the license.

I removed those files that are optional in JRE , unfortunately I can
not remove charset.jar because of internationalization.  I was able to
comrpess JRE, RCP to a size of 9mb. Very impressive.  Still plus my
plugins, the size goes to 12mb.

I notice harmony has an JRE under apache license. and all the jars are
modular. I am not good at apache license. Does it allow us to remove
the components? I think so.

I tested Eclipse on Harmony, it runs well. Apache also claims it
supports eclipse.  That means we can distribute a working JRE without
AWT,SWING and other components we do not need for RCP.  I expect after
compression, the JRE can be like 2-4 MB.

Any inputs?

Zhaojun