Getting Started without Maven

If you do not want to install Maven then you can easily download an all-in-one JAR for a TrueVFS Profile from Maven Central. For a start, you should download the all-in-one JAR for the TrueVFS Profile Default.

Side effects

Profiles bundle some TrueVFS modules so that you can easily use them as a single all-in-one dependency. Other than that, profiles do not provide additional functionality. While using a profile is very convenient, it may provide some unwanted side effects:

  • File system driver modules advertise services on the class path so that the client module TrueVFS Access can detect all canonical file extensions for all their file system driver classes. This may confuse an application if it doesn't expect an archive file to behave like a virtual directory.
  • In case of TAR files, the driver module TrueVFS Driver TAR will unpack the entire TAR file into a temporary directory first because the TAR file format lacks a central directory for fast random access. This may seriously degrade performance if not needed.
  • In case of ZIP.RAES files, the driver module TrueVFS Driver ZIP.RAES will prompt the user with a Swing or Console based dialog to enter a password in order to access the encrypted file contents. This may confuse the user if not needed.

Remedy

To avoid unwanted side effects, you could either...

  1. switch to Maven and simply exclude the unwanted modules from the profile (here's a sample), or...
  2. customize the initial configuration in code (here's a sample), or...
  3. manually add the JARs for only the desired modules.

The last resolution is the most cumbersome and so is generally discouraged.