I'm developing a Java Applet, and reducing the size of the binary code will make the applet open faster and will improve the user experience.
Is there anything I can do to reduce the size of classes and / or jar files? I want to be sure I'm not missing obvious tricks.
I know that in the C++ world compiler options for e.g. stripping debug symbols can make a huge difference, but I've never seen something like that for Java.
You can use
javac -g:none
to remove debugging information - I don't know how much difference it's likely to make though.
How convinced are you that the download time is the bottleneck? How big is the applet? Unless it's enormous, I doubt that size will make much difference after it's downloaded.