I’m reviewing the possibilities of GroupDocs.Viewer for one of our customers.
After downloading and extracting the GroupDocs.Viewer_2.9.1.zip and reviewing the GroupDocs.Viewer.jar I was a little disappointed by the fact that this jar not only contains the GroupDocs.Viewer but also all other needed libraries like Jackson, jsoup, Apache commons etc.
This not only results in a much larger .jar file (just a little over 100 Mb), but also can lead to class loading conflicts. In our case we have a conflict with the Jackson libraries we are already using. The only way to solve this directly was manually deleting the com.fasterxml.jackson directory from the GroupDocs.Viewer.jar and using this modified version in our application.
Besides that I think it’s also better to give developers insights in the used dependencies and their versions. As far I can see finding out what versions are used is not possible.
So I was wondering if there is also a more light-weight version of theGroupDocs.Viewer which uses maven to resolve it’s needed dependencies and gives us the possibility to change certain library versions.
Hello there,
Thank you for interest in the GroupDocs and for this analysis of the GroupDocs.Viewer for Java library. Actually we distribute our Java libraries in two ways: one is what you checked – fat jar with all dependencies, the other one is a slim jar with only GroupDocs.Viewer packaged. Slim library is released in the Maven central repository with all dependencies listed (http://search.maven.org/#artifactdetails%7Ccom.groupdocs%7Cgroupdocs-viewer%7C2.9.1%7Cjar).
Hi there, you are welcome.
Thank you for the suggestion. Now the documentation is extended and includes notes about the slim library version. We hope it will help you and other people to avoid the confusion in the future.