As expected, the JRE size keeps getting larger as new functionality is added to it. Unfortunately, as of 1.4 the JRE has grown so large that it is becoming
almost impossible for ISVs to redistribute it with their applications. My
ISV is aware of the list of files in the README which may be optionally
excluded from redistributions. However, excluding these files will still not
reduce the JRE size into something reasonable.

The following is a suggestion from my ISV on how to reduce the size of the JRE:

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Our solution for delivering course content via the web uses a java applet.
To make it easiest for delivery to our customers we have chosen to remain
compliant with the 1.1 jvm so that the applet will run in all versions of
browsers. Our application delivery of our product uses the same base code
as well as a few features of the java 2 vm including audio and SSL support.

The crux of our problem is our application download when moving our
application product from 1.1 jre to the 1.3 jre doubled in size without much
increase in functionality. Since we support a variety of customers a 10mb
application for our dialup customers is quite a burden and takes 90 minutes
to download.

Ideally we would like a way to customize the JRE - i know there is quite a
bit in there that we don't take advantage of including all of the different
audio and video media types, database hooks etc. If we could somehow
eliminate the parts of the jre we just don't need we could significantly
decrease the size of our download. Currently moving to the 1.4 jre is just
not an option for us, as it would double again in size our download.

Doing some work with the JMF from Sun there was a customization tool that
allowed the developer to choose only those media types they wanted to
support, the end result was a much smaller and nibbler jmf.jar file. This
would be an ideal solution for customizing the 1.3 or 1.4 jre. If however
that is not possible we would like to be able to customize it ourselves. We
would do a very thorough job testing our application to make sure we
delivered all of the functional support necessary in the jre for our
application.

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