I've been working on a small Java application with a colleague to simulate animal movements and look at the efficiency of different survey methods. It uses the GeoTools library to support map projections and shapefile output. GeoTools is great but comes at a cost in terms of size: the jar for our little application alone is less than 50kb but bundling it with GeoTools and its dependencies blows that out to 20Mb. The application code has been changing on a daily basis as we explore ideas, add features and fix bugs. Working with my colleague at a distance, over a fairly feeble internet connection, I wanted to package the static libraries and the volatile application into separate jars so that he only needed to download the former once (another option would have been for my colleague to set up a local Maven repository but for various reasons this was impractical). A slight complication with bundling GeoTools modules into a single jar (aka uber-jar) is that individual modules make ext