JAR is a tool for creating compressed file

Data compression

In computer science and information theory, data compression, source coding or bit-rate reduction is the process of encoding information using fewer bits than the original representation would use....

 archive

Archive

An archive is a collection of historical records, or the physical place they are located. Archives contain primary source documents that have accumulated over the course of an individual or organization's lifetime, and are kept to show the function of an organization...

s. It was invented by Robert K. Jung and was meant to be a successor to ARJ

ARJ

ARJ is a software tool designed by Robert K. Jung for creating high-efficiency compressed file archives. ARJ is currently on version 2.85 for DOS and 3.15 for Windows and supports 16-bit and 32-bit Intel architectures.ARJ was one of two mainstream archivers for DOS and Windows during early and...

. It can achieve very good compression, but is not in wide use. JAR should not be confused with the .jar file extension used for Java Archive files

JAR (file format)

In software, JAR is an archive file format typically used to aggregate many Java class files and associated metadata and resources into one file to distribute application software or libraries on the Java platform.JAR files are built on the ZIP file format and have the .jar file extension...

, which are actually zip files

ZIP (file format)

Zip is a file format used for data compression and archiving. A zip file contains one or more files that have been compressed, to reduce file size, or stored as is...

 with some embedded metadata

Metadata

The term metadata is an ambiguous term which is used for two fundamentally different concepts . Although the expression "data about data" is often used, it does not apply to both in the same way. Structural metadata, the design and specification of data structures, cannot be about data, because at...

. JAR uses .j as its file extension.

External links

• ARJ Software Inc.