Hello, Yves.
The footprint problem has been with us for some time. I expect there will probably not be much improvement until GlassFish V3, unfortunately. In V3 there are likely to be lots of changes in how JARs are packaged anyway and from the engineering point of view that would be a natural time to really slim down the app client footprint. It's just a matter of having lots of things we'd like to do and having to choose what to work on first.
I will talk this over with a few people and see if there might be some things we could do in the meantime, but I don't want to offer too much encouragement because I think it's unlikely much can be done until later.
Writing your own JNLP document and packaging it and your client-side application JAR into a Java EE app is certainly a possibility. Looking at the generated JNLP would give you a starting point. Unfortunately, you would lose not only the auto-Java Web Start support but also the convenience of using annotations to refer to EJBs, etc. since it is the ACC that injects the actual references into the code at runtime.
Do you have a idea of how much of a reduction would be needed in the footprint to make the built-in Java Web Start approach feasible for your users?
Also, not to minimize the pain the end-user feels, but the app server JARs such as the ones you listed are downloaded only once per end-user system. Java Web Start caches them locally so future app client launches - of the same client or different ones from the same app server - will not require those JARs to be downloaded again. That first launch is painful but later ones should be much better.
- Tim
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