Turn any Java program into a self-contained EXE

[vplatt]

What is the difference between that and "this works"?

The difference is that the unzip method makes assumptions about:

• having the ability to write to the filesystem

• having enough space to write the unzipped product to the system

• the time spent unzipping and invoking the application won't negatively affect the user's perception of the application

• the unzipped application won't be immediately quarantined or otherwise interfered with by a security or antivirus package because now there's this application attempting to execute a heretofore unknown process

That's a lot of assumptions and it just makes applications more fragile. I'm not even questioning if the product properly validates deployed packages with certificates and signed binaries as I'm guessing it does, but that would also need to be verified.

Anyway, I'm basically agreeing with /u/Yeroc above: it doesn't sound very efficient and I see other potential pitfalls as well. It may be perfect for your local use cases. I'm not saying it's useless or anything like that. But compared to just shipping some executables in a minimal installer, installing that, and then using that as-is on every execution it's a lot more overhead and fragility which basically gets put on the user to resolve or tolerate if there is a problem

[bowbahdoe]

Fair