If I must choose one of these options, I'd like to have option 2.
But my favorite is option 3: Complete separation of deployment tasks from startup tasks! Pulling stuff from the server, exploding it on the directory, and telling the client where to find its classes is clearly part of the deployment phase and shall be done ONCE. The startup shall be actually just simple as executing java -jar client.jar (where client.jar has META-INF Class-Path: entries pointing to the needed libraries). THAT would improve startup time much more than any kind of deferred extraction. And I do not see any good argument against it, since it is what EVERY non-JavaEE application works like anyways.
Regards
Markus
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