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

[DM Smith]

Zhaojun,

I looked at distributing the JRE with BibleDesktop as part of the 
"Portable BibleDesktop" effort (see www.crosswire.org/~dmsmith/bd). The 
goal here was to have it fully expanded so that it would work on a 
CD-ROM or a USB drive on any platform. I too found that it is big.

I would be very interested to know how you recompressed the JRE and how 
you would expand it again upon delivery.

As far as BibleDesktop goes, we are stuck with Sun's implementation of 
Swing. I think that JSword or Common can use most 1.4 level JREs. I had 
problems with IBMs JRE and I think it had to do with charsets, but I'm 
not sure.

The exciting part of RCP/JFace/SWT is that we could use other JREs, 
including GNU's and Apache's.

I read the license for Harmony and clause 4 gives us the right to 
distribute.

DM

Zhaojun Li(李召军) wrote:
> 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
>