Actually, you can have Jars in Jars. Of course, you need to do the lifting yourself. It is actually very nice to have a simple unpack / installation application inside a Jar and to unpack the actual application from this Jar. In this way, the only requirement for unpack / installation is the JVM, which you already require to run the application itself. This is much more elegant than a platform dependent unpack / installation (installer binary or ZIP plus Windows Batch or a Shell script).