For many years, Phil Katz’s archive creation, zip, has been one of the most popular file archiving formats. Sun has adopted the zip format as the basis for the Java Archive (JAR). Sun has extended the zip format’s use with various conventions so that you can pack Java classes into an archive file. With the addition of the JAR manifest file, the Java runtime can easily locate and directly execute the main class of the Java application contained in the jar file.
Some zip utility tools can create self-extracting archives for various platforms, such as MS Windows. The utility tool combines a regular zip archive with an extractor program to generate a new executable (exe) file. Receivers of the exe file only need to run it to extract the original zip archive’s contents. The executable runs the extractor program to extract the archived files into a user-specified output directory.
