Name: gh8910 Date: 11/11/99



In order to reduce download times for large applets or
applications it would be desirable to support a denser
JAR format.

As part of JRE 1.2.2 the "crunch" program was implemented as a
special-case tool to compress rt.jar. This helped significantly
to reduce the download size of the JRE. For large JARs the
combination of "crunch" and a secondary compressor can achieve
almost a 50% reduction over a normal compressed JAR file.

The "crunch" format may or may not be a useful beginning for
this work. We need to define a well specified dense format
that can be implemented by third pary tools, and we need to
support that format in the JRE.

We do not need to change the Java VM or runtimes to support
the new format. Instead it seems better to decompress a
dense JAR into conventional JAR format as soon as it is
downloaded and then use the regular JAR loader.


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