During a chat with Marshall, a JBoss Eclipse dev, we started talking about pack200, the (not new anymore) Java 5 Jar compressor. I was making the point that the Red Hat Developer Studio could loose a little fat now that it peaks at 500+Mb, or soon it would be as big as some Eclipse-based studio that tops at 2+Gb (wink). And that pack200 could be an excellent way to tackle the problem and remove the crap. Marshall ran a quick test on the hibernate tools libraries plugin and got a ~ 72% size reduction from 12MB to about 3.3MB. 72% crap removed. Not bad.
Now Eclipse has been available as packed archive since Callisto, with great success, saving tons of bandwidth from downloads. Why not have built-in Java support for loading packed Jars? Why not built-in OSGI support?
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I was also able to reduce the size of our ZIP distribution from 73MB to 40MB using the pack200 ant task here:
https://java-pack200-ant-task.dev.java.net/
Make sure to use gzipoutput=”true” and effort=”9″ to get the maximum effect. Also, the task seems to run out of memory pretty often.. tweaking Ant’s VM args should probably fix it but I haven’t tried yet.
I think you need to pass something like: -J-Xmx1024M to the pack200 exe to have it recognize VM args
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