Auto-update of native application bundles

[Daniel Zwolenski]

On Sat, Jun 16, 2012 at 9:52 PM, Dr. Michael Paus <mp at jugs.org> wrote:

> Am 16.06.2012 12:43, schrieb Daniel Zwolenski:
>
>>
>> Is your JRE really 20MB? If so that would be awesome, but I'm not sure
>> how I managed to end up with such a massive one. I admit I have had about
>> 50 different versions of JRE's + JDKs on this machine over the last 12
>> months (every client I have has different  version requirements and half of
>> them have legacy projects and require multiple JREs at the one site!).
>>
> I just downloaded the latest JRE7 offline installer from this web page:
> http://www.oracle.com/**technetwork/java/javase/**
> downloads/jre7-downloads-**1637588.html<http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/downloads/jre7-downloads-1637588.html>
> The windows offline installers are almost exactly 20MB and if I understood
> it correctly the also already contain JavaFX.
> And as I already said, the size of this should be further reducible if one
> would kick out everything that is not needed for an embedded JRE
> but the Oracle guys should know that much better than I do.
>
> LG, Michael
>

Ah, ok. The JRE install is 20MB compressed but when you install it, it
extracts to 90MB. So the reason my MSI is 30MB is due to the fact that the
tools I am using are not compressing the files as effectively as whatever
is used to build the JRE installer. I currently use the third party
tool Advanced
Installer <http://www.advancedinstaller.com/> to assemble my MSI. It does
have an option to use LZMA compression, which might result in a smaller
installer but I have to upgrade to the paid version for that.

Since the ultimate goal will be to use Igor's MSI assembler, it's probably
more important what compression algorithm is used by his tools. I notice
that the Ensemble MSI produced from the new packaging tools is around 50MB
as well, so I'm guessing Igor is doing a similar method of compression. I'm
guessing that this is all done by WiX however, rather than code he has
written directly. There is a 'CompressionLevel' attribute in WiX from the
look of it - but I'm not sure what level Igor uses by default?

On the topic of stripping stuff out to make the install smaller, this is
definitely an option and something to look at long term. I did have a
little look at this but since the compression was already dropping the size
from 90MB to 30MB, I would have to strip out some significant chunks to
make much impact on the resulting MSI (even more if we manage to compress
it down to 20MB). Since the Java rt.jar is already 50MB, stripping out the
other bits and pieces I could find was having very meagre gains. Killing
"classes.jsa" might shave a few MB though, assuming this doesn't break
anything. It's something to look into but is probably more important on
Igor's end.

I suspect the best answer we'll be able to manage on this topic will be:
just put up with the larger download sizes for jre7 and await the magical
wonder of jre8 (let's hope it delivers on its promise in this area!).