Man! It's not believable... JDK 1.5 (a.k.a Tiger) is going to bring us a very efficient archiving format maybe comparable with CAB or so! Great thanks to JSR200 group and William Pugh for what they've done in this regard. The new compression format is called Pack200 and there is the way to go back and forth from JAR to Pack200 and vice versa. After the JVM sharing and Swing enhancements, I guess it's going to be the next big thing for the client side java. javax.pack package ROCKS!
Reading some test results here, they're just amazing and seem unbeatable. Can't wait to have it in action on my client side applications (specially)!!
Armond
Posted by armond at February 8, 2004 09:46 AMBefore you run out of breath, remember that the original rt.jar is not compressed. It's just zipped. Granted, the pack200 can compress it even smaller but the difference isn't 'unbelievable'.
You can extract the original rt.jar and then zip it with maximum compression ratio to achieve 12..14MB file size.
Posted by: Nipsu at February 8, 2004 05:28 PMI'd be curious to know what the performance impact of this is. Disk space is cheap, and on a typical office network the bandwidth used in distributing software locally is pretty negligible.
If Java takes 5 seconds longer to start, I'd rather just waste the disk space...
Posted by: Kevin Dangoor at February 9, 2004 04:02 AMNipsu,
rt.jar itself may not be compressed but the whole installation bundle is, which makes the entire download size way smaller. It may not be a big problem for guys out there with Cable and DSL connections but for dialup ones it does differ a lot and kinda encourages the people (normal end-users) to download JRE with more willing...
Okay, it's not revolutionary or whatever... But compressing it with maximum ZIP compression makes it 12-14MB while according to the results, compressing rt.jar of Tiger (35MB) makes it 4MB :-) 3 times smaller than the with ZIP...
IMHO it does matter a lot. I have client applications with tens of MB of libraries, having them in Pack200 format will be pretty brilliant (smaller size by factor of 3 or maybe greater even!).
Thanks for your comments mate :-) Hope to hear from you again here...
Good Luck!
Kevin,
Quite a right concern! All in all, I agree with you... You shouldn't feel any difference while working with these two archiving formats. It won't be usable if the access time be noticeablly lower. A bit lower is acceptable since as soon as it's fetched out of the archive, it will go in memory and all the future accesses will be fast like before (at least I guess so).
In my opinion, it's playing more important role on download size rather than the disk space... Nowadays everyone can easily have access to higher capacity storages and on the other hand the java programs are not that much big in compare with other native types (from disk capacity point of view). But when it comes to network capacities and speeds, the story is a bit different. Not everyone in the world has access to high speed connections so the size really does matter for them.
Thanks for your comments...
Good Luck!
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