JAR Hell with XFire 1.2.6
I discovered something somewhat disturbing last week. As part of AppFuse 2.0 M5, we added "xfire-all" as a dependency so web services could be supported out-of-the-box. What I didn't know is that xfire-all has transitive dependencies to 40 other libraries, which total 13.4 MB in size. Yikes!
Does XFire take the cake for the most bloated library you can use or are we just including too much (xfire-all vs. fine-grained dependencies)? I tried changing to the recommended Maven configuration and there's still 28 JARs added by XFire.
The WEB-INF/lib directory of a basic Struts 2 + Spring + Hibernate AppFuse application is already 19.2 MB to start. Adding XFire for web services increases the size to 29.2 MB. While disk space may be cheap, some users have noticed "mvn jetty:run" is much slower with XFire (presumably from the JAR processing that happens at startup). Is there an uber XFire JAR we can use instead?