[einrealist]

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).

[depsypher]

spring boot has done the lifting: http://docs.spring.io/spring-boot/docs/current-SNAPSHOT/refe...

[pron]

That is actually very similar to Capsule, except that it doesn't support Maven, automatic upgrades, and as far as I can tell - JVM configuration (heap size, agents etc). I think Capsule is a strict superset in terms of features.

[Yeroc]

Huh, jars within jars... sounds a lot like .war files!