The Java Tutorials have been written for JDK 8. Examples and practices described in this page don't take advantage of improvements introduced in later releases and might use technology no longer available.
See Dev.java for updated tutorials taking advantage of the latest releases.
See Java Language Changes for a summary of updated language features in Java SE 9 and subsequent releases.
See JDK Release Notes for information about new features, enhancements, and removed or deprecated options for all JDK releases.

Adding an External Library

Self-contained applications include everything that an application needs to run. If your application requires an external library, that library can be added to the bundle for the application. Adding the library can be done in different ways.

The File Association Demo described in Using File Associations downloads the Groovy library as part of the build process. The library is placed in the /lib directory in the project for the application. This directory is then copied to the /dist directory from which the self-contained application bundle is generated.

The following code in the -pre-init task in the build.xml file shows how the library is downloaded:

<!-- download and copy groovy library -->
<copy toFile="lib/groovy-all-2.3.8.jar">
 <resources>
 <url url="http://central.maven.org/maven2/org/codehaus/groovy/groovy-all/2.3.8/groovy-all-2.3.8.jar"/>
 </resources>
</copy>

See build.xml for the complete build code.

You can download the source files for the File Association Demo from Self-Contained Application Examples.