Thread: Incremental change to a java program

I would like to make an incremental change to an existing Java program. And the program has been installed on the user's machine. Now I only want to do an incremental download (to minimize the download time) to update the program. 1) Can I do that? 2) If I can, how do I do it? Thanks in advance.
P.S. I don't know if this is the right sub-forum. But this is the closest I can find.

1 - You haven't given us enough details to answer. E.g., How would you have access to the user's existing program? Is it a desktop program, Android, what? How was the existing program deployed? What have you tried?

Originally Posted by GregBrannon

1 - You haven't given us enough details to answer. E.g., How would you have access to the user's existing program? Is it a desktop program, Android, what? How was the existing program deployed? What have you tried?

-) This will be a desk top program (i.e. Java standard alone program, not applet). The user uses JVM to run the existing Java code. The hardware platform is Window, Mac and Linux.
-) I haven't tried any method yet.

Thanks a lot for your help.

The program is about 3 to 5M size. The key reason is that we will have a lot of small changes very often. The program will be deployed as a jar file.

Originally Posted by KevinWorkman

Java Web Start is definitely one way to go. You can package your program up as a list of jars, and it will only download one of those jars when it's uploaded instead of downloading all of them.

There are other more manual ways. A jar file is really just a zip file, so updating one of the classes in it is as simple as inserting the new version. That can introduce some management issues though, and I've never heard of anyone actually taking this approach.

You might also consider using maven to manage your dependencies, but that requires your clients to build your software.

Although, 5 MB really isn't that big, unless you're on some kind of restricted network.

I got it. Thank you so much for your help!