Minimizing jar dependency sizes

Question

Hello, an application I have written uses several third party jars. Sometimes only a small portion of the entire 50kB to 1.7mB jar is used - one or two function calls or classes.

What is the best way to reduce the jar sizes. Should I download the sources and build a jar with just the classes I need? What existing tools can help automate this (ex I briefly looked at http://code.google.com/p/jarjar/)?

Thank you

Edit 1: I would like to lower the size of my third party 'official' jars like swingx-1.6.jar (1.4 MB), set-3.6 (1.7 MB) glazedlists-1.8.jar (820kB) , etc. so that they only contain the bare minimum classes I need

Edit 2: Minimizing a jar by hand or by using a program like proguard is further complicated if the library uses reflection. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2369939/injection-with-google-guice-does-not-work-anymore-after-obfuscation-with-proguard

The answer by cletus on another post is very good http://stackoverflow.com/questions/475516/how-to-determine-which-classes-are-used-by-a-java-program

Answer 1

Proguard would be an option. It can eliminate unused classes and methods. You can also use it to obfuscate, which can further reduce the size of your final jar. Be aware that class loading by name is liable to break unless care is taken to keep the affected classes unobfuscated.

I've found Proguard quite effective - can be a bit cryptic to understand at the outset. But I don't have any experience with similar to offer a comparison.

Answer 2

First of all, if you use only one class from JAR file this does not mean that this class does not use other classed from that JAR. The option for you, if you use open source JARs, is to get sources of that JAR, attach them to your project, remove unnecessary stuff and build the changes by yourself.

Answer 3

You could add GenJar as an Ant task and use it to build the JAR. As it says on the library's home page,

GenJar is a specialized Ant task that builds jar files based on class dependencies rather than simply the contents of a directory.

You can find it on SourceForge.