Hi Tim,
From your description it sounds like you are not so much interested in the implementation details of the Harmony JAR files, but you are looking for "compile against JARs" for a full Java SE API. Is that right?
right. Unfortunately, grabbing the JARs of a full Java SE API is a lot harder with tools like Maven than grabbing the JARs of a plain-old library. The Sun/Oracle puts a click-through license in your way, which obviously blocks automated build tools like Maven. And GNU Classpath is not even distributed in binary form. It's always ./configure; make first. :-(
The Apache Harmony distribution is much nicer in this respect. The only thing that causes grief, besides it being not available in, say, Maven central, is that you have dozens of JARs with no dependency information your build tool understands (unless in OSGi-land). And manually building that classpath "to compile against" is not fun. I've been there...
I hope this clarifies things. Andreas Sewe
