I would look at it, what could be bastardized from JSDK5.0. Could it be down to 5 MB? It might look interesting actually. The problem is JOGL and other libraries last time I looked it was over 1 MB download. It needs a smart start/setup center that would alow to have several JVM on one computer and will be able to switch between JITs if there would be bug. It would be nice to have diff updater for dlls and libraries. (And diff classloader that would alow to run an old applications in compatibility mode, it might solve the problem with real generics.)
Some Java instalation verifier and repairer should be included too. Prefferably small and self running to alow simply repair wrongly registered jars (Windoze), and botched simlinks (Aaaaarggggh Linux).
Done it already… got the distribution down to 2.5mb, and that includes networking and RMI!
Cas 
With or without swing?
Have you created a bug requesting a kind of modular JRE? I’m sure a lot of us would vote for it.
That’s without swing. Swing and awt takes up a great big chunk of the jre. It would be the first to go if you wan’t to reduce size. Do your gui with opengl.
[quote]That’s without swing. Swing and awt takes up a great big chunk of the jre. It would be the first to go if you wan’t to reduce size. Do your gui with opengl.
[/quote]
well, more to the point, do your gui (and the rest of your game obviously !) with the LWJGL bindings for OpenGL , not JOGL as Cas would be sure to point out. JOGL has several AWT dependencies. You can of course still get rid of swing. Although this is all academic given the terms of the license 
D.
well hopefully if enough ppl make a racket about it, sun might just listen to its gaming community and change the licence!
Well, if you re-read my post, I was talking about a Java2D game, not LWJGL. awt is necessary.
[quote] OK,
if it was possible to make the JRE modular for a Java2D based game that doesn’t do networking (apart webstart), I was wondering if there were problems to have that special JRE by removing the following packages?
- java.applet
- java.rmi.*
- java.sql
- javax.accessibility
- javax.activity
- javax.management.*
- javax.naming.*
- javax.print.*
- javax.rmi.*
- javax.sql.*
- org.omg.*
I’m sure many of you would be tempted to remove javax.swing.* too be you have to realize that Swing can be really helpful to build game UIs.
And assuming a game can reuse an already installed JRE but needs some of the missing packages then it could invoke commands via a standard API to request the required ones from Sun’s server.
I’m just curious about the possibility of doing this.
[/quote]
Removing the packages you mentioned would reduce the size of the jre with 500k, wich is nothing compared to awt and swing.
What we need is runtime that only contains:
java.lang.*
java.io.*
java.util.*
Everyting else would be provided in external libraries. Of course, this would not be a shared runtime.
LWJGL don’t have to be the only display/input library that is indepentant of awt. There could be awt independant ports of c engines, like SDL, Irrlicht, OGRE etc.
From reading the article it seems that they are talking about small devices (telephone). They are saying that it’s becoming interesting to embed a reduced j2se in telephone or mini computers instead of j2me.
I’m sure Sun will be okay to do that for small devices because it is a growing market and they don’t want to loose it, but I would be surprised if they allowed you to embed a “customized” jvm with a desktop application.
That is not in their interest, their interest being to have their jvm installed on a maximum of machines.
Since Sun’s J2SE Embedded will include JSR-1 (RTSJ), would it good to use this in your code for real time animation and response?
There should be some really useful stuff for games programmers in JSR-001. Stuff, I’m hoping, like timeslice schedulers for Tasks and the like, which means we don’t have to rely on the vagaries of Threads.
Cas
Thanks Cas!