Re: [cross-project-issues-dev] Jars in jars is good citicenship?

[John Arthorne <John_Arthorne@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Thomas Hallgren wrote on 11/06/2007 02:33:33 AM:
> John Arthorne wrote:
> > Well, it really depends on the situation. If a plugin contains
a 
> > nested jar, plus thousands of other files, there is certainly
> > performance gain in install time, disk space, etc, from jarring.
The 
> > benefit of jarring tends to accumulate over a large body of plugins
- 
> > it might be a small gain for a single plugin, but for an application
> > with a 1000 plugins, it adds up.
>
> In practice, I doubt that nested jars will ever be an optimization.
If 
> you have a high number of plug-ins with nested jars and if most of
them 
> has a large number of files outside of the jars, then yes, the space
> gained by compressing might be significant. But is it always favorable?
> Will we ever see an application assembled that way?

I didn't say it's always favorable, I said it depends
on the situation.  Since you doubt that nested jars will ever be an
optimization, I give you just one example from the Eclipse SDK. The org.eclipse.platform.doc.isv
plugin, which contains a nested JAR, consumes 28,930,048 bytes (27.5 MB)
of disk space. When I unzip this JAR, it consumes 181,501,952 bytes (173
MB) of disk space.  Disk space may be cheap, but I still consider
this to be an important optimization. 

John