[josm-dev] .jar file size is too big

[Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason]

On Fri, Jul 17, 2009 at 12:07 PM, Frederik Ramm<frederik at remote.org> wrote:
> I propose to split up the build process so that it builds a special
> version for each language. In addition, we can keep building the
> all-languages version for those in a true multilingual environment (or
> those on a fat pipe who would rather not be bothered). That would be the
> easiest way to tackle the problem. I'm not an ant guru but I think even
> I could do that.

FWIW not all users follow the pattern of always using an application
in one language or downloading it in their native one from the start.
Some users I've talked to didn't know that there was an Icelandic
translation of JOSM but it was easy to switch to it in the preferences
once they did, which wouldn't be that easy if they'd downloaded the
popular lean English version which most will probably gravitate to.

But do the JOSM translations really need to be so big in the first
place? I tried tar-bzipping up MediaWiki's translations and it came to
5.6MB. MediaWiki has 340 languages and around 2500 translatable
messages. If I bzipped up the 20 largest files (which have almost
everything translated) that came to 1.2 MB.

It looks like the Java gettext system is very wasteful in this regard.

> (I also like the Web Start idea but I have burnt my fingers with that on
> Linux using non-Sun Java installations in the past so I'm not sure how
> far I want to trust it; plus I am unsure how good this works when you're
> offline?)

Webstart is just a mechanism to automatically download & start a JAR
file in a modified sandbox. It's just a glorified download plugin for
your browser. So it'll work just like a normal JOSM (except for some
further sandbox restrictions) when offline.

You'll also burn your fingers on Linux when you run it on a non-Sun
Java regardless of whether you use WebStart or not in my experience,
although webstart has some other bugs on non-Sun Java that I've filed
at least one bug for:

http://josm.openstreetmap.de/ticket/2299