Streamlining dependencies for distribution

[Andrew Clegg <an...@gmail.com>]

Morning all,

I'm working on a sample client app (just a command line thing) to
distribute to our collaborators, to demonstrate usage of our services.

To keep things simple, I've built a single jar using Maven's assembly
plugin, which contains all the dependencies. This weighs in at a not
inconsiderable 9.9Mb, which is quite impressive considering the app
essentially just dispatches a single request to a remote service, and
parses the response payload before printing it in a tabular format. It
doesn't even use databinding.

Is this kind of size normal or have I misconfigured something? Is
there an easy way to reduce this?

Unzipping the jar I find 3.5Mb of Spring, a hefty 11Mb in org/apache,
just over half of which is CXF itself, and another 11Mb in com/sun.

I can't help thinking this won't be a particularly good advert for
Java (and/or CXF) if I distribute it to people who'll say, I can get
exactly the same functionality with half a meg of Perl or Python (or
less)...

I know there are tools like ProGuard and Autojar which can strip out
unused classes from jars, but I'm having problems getting them to work
correctly, and I'm a little worried about how they'll deal with
dynamic class loading, dependency injection etc.

Any thoughts?

Andrew.