Christian posted about Is 159 jar files too many?
It is a little crazy isn’t it? I had been thinking about a tool that would look in your lib directory, and generate a versions.txt for you… working out dependencies. This would assume that people play nice with the jar MANIFEST and put a version in there.
It is interesting how different the world is with jar files compared to the GAC and machine libraries. In these worlds we were fighting with keeping that global resource up to date, and then running into the issues with multiple versions. Now we are copying jar files all over the place.
This library hell really shows you that we reuse a lot more code that we write!. If you do a count on the jar files that you depend on versus your application jar file you will see the difference. Then you start to think about everything else that you depend on (OS, network, etc) and we are just writing some glue at the top of the mountain!
August 4th, 2004 at 3:01 pm
Yeah that would be great. It would even be fun if the tool said:
“Look dude. Although you are referencing these 3 jars which are 10 MB each, you only use a couple of classes from them, so here is a 10k jar which just has that” ;)
We should start up an open source for this tool :)
D
September 30th, 2004 at 6:25 am
Jar Jam
Jar files. Useful things but they can be a huge source of problems. And not just during deployment… I’ve recently had a need to know the various dependencies within and on jar files and whilst there are some dependency tools out there (e.g. JDe…
March 23rd, 2005 at 7:03 am
It is impossible!
March 29th, 2005 at 12:11 pm
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