Welcome to JavaRanch.
What do you need help with?
In my opinion, trying to brute-force AES-128 is pointless unless you have a USD $100m supercomputer, and even then it will take months or years.
How do you propose a dictionary attack might work? That's something for cracking passwords, not encryption.
As an aside, java.util.zip works just fine; I've never had any problems with it. And if I needed support for other compression formats, I'd go with
http://commons.apache.org/compress/