Installing Your Game

Question

I reckon that my local installation of Java is pretty standard - I've got the JDK in one directory, my own generic classes in another directory, and classes specfic to a particular prog/game in another directory. How does anyone else easily transfer these classes onto another PC, i.e. as an installation package? I assume you put them all into a JAR file, but how do you know which classes to include? Is there a way to automatically extract just the classes you need, or do you just stick them all in? Or do you go through your program and manually include each class you use?
Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

the standard library is part of the jre, so you don't have to package it with your jar file. but the library depends on what jre the user has.
if the user only has java 1.1 you won't be able to use 1.4 features like the javax.swing, javax.imageio, etc.
i guess you could package up the parts of the library you need that are not included in the 1.1 library.
id rather just pick the minimum jre to run on, then restrict yourself to features in that version of the library.
how to find what non-jdk classes are used?
you need the min classes to compile the app.
so all the classes in your project, then the classes from any libraries used (beside the java lib).
or say you explicitly import every class your using
import org.lib.LibClassA; ( instead of)
import org.lib.*;
then all the explicit imports equals all the files needed in your jar package.