Vitaly Mikheev

The JFC/Swing API, natively precompiled on Linux for the first time, delivers measurable improvement in Java GUI performance. The Excelsior Engineering Team has ported Excelsior JET, a Java Virtual Machine (JVM) with an ahead-of-time compiler, to the Linux/x86 platform. As the JET JVM supports the entire J2SE platform API including the Java Foundation Classes (JFC/Swing), Excelsior engineers had an opportunity to evaluate the response time of natively compiled JFC/Swing on Linux. The results of the comparison with conventional, dynamically optimizing JVMs were encouraging: response time has improved by 40% or even doubled on some benchmarks. What's more important is that real-world Swing applications performed perceivably faster. This article describes Excelsior JET JVM and JFCMark, free benchmark software by Excelsior that measures Swing-based GUI performance. More... (more)

A Light Java Runtime to Bundle with Applications

Java Development on Ulitzer Steve Jobs once said that Java is a big heavyweight ball and chain. Good news: the ball is now optional! In this article, I share results we achieved after implementing a component deployment model, also known as JRE modularity, for the core of J2SE 5.0 and Java SE 6. The technology’s been in production use for more than two years and proved effective. This is not a mere “Java gets smaller” message. Given that Project Jigsaw is emerging in JDK 7, I also offer some insights on the challenges that any implementation of modularity for the Java SE core may ... (more)