Depends on what you use
A lot of the packages floating around out there are enormous for what they do. I've been working on a dbms modeling tool. I wanted to add diagramming. I thought using svg would be cool so I checked out the batik lib at apache.
Fuggeddaboudit. Its something like 8 jars and they're all huge. I just want boxes and lines and persistence. I wrote my own graph tool (all graph builder components I've seen on the web have been slow, large, swing-like over-engineered (factory factories to generate builders of adaptors and 4 levels of model mapping) and ugly besides.
The only thing I didn't write is the PNGEncoder - its one class with a single interesting method.
I think you can write lean java programs - as long as you don't download any "free" components.
I think that it's extraordinarily important that we in computer science keep fun in computing. When it started out, it was an awful lot of fun. Of course, the paying customer got shafted every now and then, and after a while we began to take their complaints seriously. We began to feel as if we really were responsible for the successful, error-free perfect use of these machines. I don't think we are. I think we're responsible for stretching them, setting them off in new directions, and keeping fun in the house. I hope the field of computer science never loses its sense of fun. Above all, I hope we don't become missionaries. Don't feel as if you're Bible salesmen. The world has too many of those already. What you know about computing other people will learn. Don't feel as if the key to successful computing is only in your hands. What's in your hands, I think and hope, is intelligence: the ability to see the machine as more than when you were first led up to it, that you can make it more.
--Alan Perlis
