Self-Contained Applications, built in Java

Question

I\'ve watched a few online presentations that briefly mentioned self-contained applications in Java 9, but I have a question that I would like cleared up.

With the n

Answer 1

jlink

Yes, this is possible with jlink (JEP 282), but all of your code and your dependencies need to be modular JARs (i.e. ones with module-info.class). It works like this:

jlink
    --module-path $JAVA_HOME/jmods:mods
    --add-modules your.app
    --launcher launch-app=your.app
    --output your-app-image

In detail:

• --module-path lists the folders that contain modules - this needs to include the platform modules shipped with the JDK you want to use (in $JAVA_HOME/jmods) and your application modules (mods)
• --add-modules names the module(s) that you want your runtime image to contain - all of its (their) transitive dependencies are included
• --launcher is optional, but very handy; it creates an OS-specific launcher (e.g. a .bat on Windows) with the given name (launch-app) that launches the specified module (your.app; in this case assuming the main class is defined for it)
• --output specifies where to create the runtime image