Minimizing jar dependency sizes

Question

an application I have written uses several third party jars. Sometimes only a small portion of the entire 50kB to 1.7mB jar is used - one or two function calls or classes.

What is the best way to reduce the jar sizes. Should I download the sources and build a jar with just the classes I need? What existing tools can help automate this (ex I briefly looked at http://code.google.com/p/jarjar/)?

Thank you

Edit 1: I would like to lower the size of my third party 'official' jars like swingx-1.6.jar (1.4 MB), set-3.6 (1.7 MB) glazedlists-1.8.jar (820kB) , etc. so that they only contain the bare minimum classes I need

Edit 2: Minimizing a jar by hand or by using a program like proguard is further complicated if the library uses reflection. Injection with google guice does not work anymore after obfuscation with proguard

The answer by cletus on another post is very good How to determine which classes are used by a Java program?

Answer 1

Proguard would be an option. It can eliminate unused classes and methods. You can also use it to obfuscate, which can further reduce the size of your final jar. Be aware that class loading by name is liable to break unless care is taken to keep the affected classes unobfuscated.

I've found Proguard quite effective - can be a bit cryptic to understand at the outset. But I don't have any experience with similar to offer a comparison.