It can also be used to automatically execute jar files with "java -jar". I don't think arch is set up to do that automatically, but it is fairly easy to do[1].
I'm a bit late to this thread, but for posterity...
FYI - Because JAR files are specially formatted ZIP files, you can also prepend a shell script stub to the front of the file. Java reads JAR files and doesn't start processing them until it sees the ZIP magic bytes (PK\x03\x04). So long as your shell script doesn't contain those bytes, you can add whatever you want.
This is about the minimal stub script you can get away with.
#!/bin/bash
exec java -jar $0 "$@"
exit 1
Using this, you don't even need binfmt to execute JARs. IMHO, the better example for binfmt and Java is executing class files directly... which is also covered in your linked Arch docs.
FYI - Because JAR files are specially formatted ZIP files, you can also prepend a shell script stub to the front of the file. Java reads JAR files and doesn't start processing them until it sees the ZIP magic bytes (PK\x03\x04). So long as your shell script doesn't contain those bytes, you can add whatever you want.
This is about the minimal stub script you can get away with.
Using this, you don't even need binfmt to execute JARs. IMHO, the better example for binfmt and Java is executing class files directly... which is also covered in your linked Arch docs.