Even though the version name Java SE 6 Update 10 only indicates small bug fixes, Sun Microsystems has put Java's fat runtime environment on a strict diet, modularising and optimising it.
Sun wants to give users more incentive to use Java software on their desktops and applets in their browsers. The tried and tested Java VM is also the basis for the new JavaFX, a web technology with which Sun intends to compete with Flash and Silverlight in browsers.
The new installer initially only loads the required libraries from the net; only 4 to 5 MB are required to start an applet or a Swing application. The previous version still required just under 15 MB.
Nimbus, a new look & feel for Swing, adds a contemporary touch to Java applications. Sun also pointed out that that the new Java is considerably faster than it was before: startup time for Java programs has been reduced and a new pipeline connects Java directly to Direct3D in Windows allowing hardware graphics acceleration. Full details of the changes are given in the release notes for Java 6u10 and an earlier article from Sun on the alpha version of Java 6u10 explains the changes in more detail.
Friday, October 17, 2008
Thursday, August 14, 2008
Aonix PERC Ultra Supports Latest VxWorks Release
Aonix®, the provider of the PERC product line for embedded and real-time Java developers, announces the release of PERC Ultra 5.1 cross development and target support on Wind River's VxWorks 6.6 real-time operating system and Wind River Workbench development suite. With more than 1 million field systems in markets such as aerospace, defense, telecommunications, industrial control and robotics, PERC Ultra well suits the broad real-time market leadership of VxWorks. These joint solutions will enable developers to take advantage of Java language capabilities while ensuring that critical deterministic behavior requirements can still be met.
Boasting the largest number of deployments for any commercial real-time virtual machine, PERC Ultra has proven itself as an embedded virtual machine that is scalable, manageable, reliable and secure. In addition to separating it from its competitors, these characteristics make it ideal for VxWorks developers who primarily focus on the safety- and mission-critical space. This version of PERC Ultra allows the PERC Virtual Machine to run as a real-time process, protecting Java applications from being corrupted by any errant C applications running on the same system. PERC Ultra also takes advantage of Wind River Advanced Networking Technologies, new with this port to VxWorks 6.6.
Notably, PERC Ultra's port to VxWorks complements an earlier port of Aonix's PERC Pico, a low-level, resource-constrained virtual machine for deeply embedded hard real-time applications and components. For the first time, Wind River developers can design the same Java language advantages of portability, scalability and modularity into applications from top to bottom, thereby streamlining application development, debugging and ongoing program maintenance.
"Most of our customers develop complex mission- and safety-critical systems," noted Rob Hoffman, vice president and general manager for Aerospace and Defense at Wind River. "Prior to Aonix's PERC family, Java technologies were unable to address these needs effectively or efficiently. Our customers are looking forward to extending their Java applications through to the device-driver level to maximize efficiency and to gain the additional portability such an extension ensures."
"PERC Ultra and VxWorks have together provided world-class tools and execution environments for a number of years," noted Gary Cato, Aonix director of marketing. "Wind River's customers have stringent applications requirements. We are proud of the fact that our combined solutions have met their criteria."
Boasting the largest number of deployments for any commercial real-time virtual machine, PERC Ultra has proven itself as an embedded virtual machine that is scalable, manageable, reliable and secure. In addition to separating it from its competitors, these characteristics make it ideal for VxWorks developers who primarily focus on the safety- and mission-critical space. This version of PERC Ultra allows the PERC Virtual Machine to run as a real-time process, protecting Java applications from being corrupted by any errant C applications running on the same system. PERC Ultra also takes advantage of Wind River Advanced Networking Technologies, new with this port to VxWorks 6.6.
Notably, PERC Ultra's port to VxWorks complements an earlier port of Aonix's PERC Pico, a low-level, resource-constrained virtual machine for deeply embedded hard real-time applications and components. For the first time, Wind River developers can design the same Java language advantages of portability, scalability and modularity into applications from top to bottom, thereby streamlining application development, debugging and ongoing program maintenance.
"Most of our customers develop complex mission- and safety-critical systems," noted Rob Hoffman, vice president and general manager for Aerospace and Defense at Wind River. "Prior to Aonix's PERC family, Java technologies were unable to address these needs effectively or efficiently. Our customers are looking forward to extending their Java applications through to the device-driver level to maximize efficiency and to gain the additional portability such an extension ensures."
"PERC Ultra and VxWorks have together provided world-class tools and execution environments for a number of years," noted Gary Cato, Aonix director of marketing. "Wind River's customers have stringent applications requirements. We are proud of the fact that our combined solutions have met their criteria."
Monday, July 21, 2008
Terracotta Helps Adobe Scale
Adobe taps Terracotta to help Adobe scale its Acrobat collaboration solution. Terracotta's software, which helps businesses scale their enterprise Java environments, will enable users to run ConnectNow without a database.
Terracotta, which makes infrastructure software for enterprise Java scalability, is providing core technology to deliver high reliability and scalability to Adobe's ConnectNow Web conferencing service in Acrobat.com.
By using Terracotta’s high-performance redundant cache in runtime state rather than a database, ConnectNow provides service for a high volume of Web meetings and activity, while enabling seamless recovery in case of a partial system failure, said Amit Pandey, CEO of Terracotta.
ConnectNow is a personal Web conferencing service designed for collaborative meetings for individual users and businesses. Users can instantly communicate and collaborate through an easy-to-use, easy-to-access online personal meeting room, Adobe officials said. ConnectNow is available for free sign up as part of the Acrobat.com public beta here.
Pandey said Terracotta’s shared application memory store is a fast-emerging approach to scale critical applications, because it offers the performance of local memory along with the high availability of a database. This capability eliminates the performance and reliability tradeoffs that constrain Java applications today, he said.
"Adobe for us is an example of the kind of customer we set out to get when the company was formed -- customers who have challenging scale issues but are not into changing their applications to make this scale happen," Pandey said. "They're an archetype of the customer we are going after. They are doing scalable Web applications but have given up on the database."
Pandey said Terracotta has been seeing a lot of momentum from customers such as Adobe. "We went open-source in December 2006 and since then have added more than 60 customers, and more than two-thirds of them have this profile," he said. The other third consists of enterprise customers "like Tangosol has gone after," Pandey said. Tangosol is Oracle's in-memory data grid technology designed to meet the new demands for real-time data analytics, compute-intensive middleware and high-performance transactions.
Terracotta, which makes infrastructure software for enterprise Java scalability, is providing core technology to deliver high reliability and scalability to Adobe's ConnectNow Web conferencing service in Acrobat.com.
By using Terracotta’s high-performance redundant cache in runtime state rather than a database, ConnectNow provides service for a high volume of Web meetings and activity, while enabling seamless recovery in case of a partial system failure, said Amit Pandey, CEO of Terracotta.
ConnectNow is a personal Web conferencing service designed for collaborative meetings for individual users and businesses. Users can instantly communicate and collaborate through an easy-to-use, easy-to-access online personal meeting room, Adobe officials said. ConnectNow is available for free sign up as part of the Acrobat.com public beta here.
Pandey said Terracotta’s shared application memory store is a fast-emerging approach to scale critical applications, because it offers the performance of local memory along with the high availability of a database. This capability eliminates the performance and reliability tradeoffs that constrain Java applications today, he said.
"Adobe for us is an example of the kind of customer we set out to get when the company was formed -- customers who have challenging scale issues but are not into changing their applications to make this scale happen," Pandey said. "They're an archetype of the customer we are going after. They are doing scalable Web applications but have given up on the database."
Pandey said Terracotta has been seeing a lot of momentum from customers such as Adobe. "We went open-source in December 2006 and since then have added more than 60 customers, and more than two-thirds of them have this profile," he said. The other third consists of enterprise customers "like Tangosol has gone after," Pandey said. Tangosol is Oracle's in-memory data grid technology designed to meet the new demands for real-time data analytics, compute-intensive middleware and high-performance transactions.
Friday, June 27, 2008
Apache looks to bring fun back to Java
Apache announced this week the first release of Apache Sling, an open-source Web framework intended to make Java development fun again, according to a bulletin from the organization.
Sling brings content into the Web and provides a platform to manage and upgrade content. It makes use of a Java content repository such as Apache Jackrabbit.
"Sling is intended to bring back the fun to Java developers and make the life of a Web developer easier," an Apache representative said.
"It's really just a framework for building a Web app," said Santi Pierini, senior vice president of marketing at Day Software, which has contributed code for Sling and uses the technology in its Communique' (CQ) content management platform. Sling still is in an incubator stage but could become an official Apache project in a few months, Pierini said.
"We're trying to create a Web framework that makes it easier to build what they call RESTful apps," said Pierini in an interview on Friday morning. With Sling, a content delivery framework and content access capabilities are provided so that developers not have to code these themselves, he said.
Sling can be used for building various types of Web applications, including wikis, blogs, customer self service, and digital asset management systems, Pierini said.
The framework is based on Java Specification Request 170 for Java Content Repositories. That specification features an API for interacting with these repositories. Additionally, an embedded Apache Felix OSGi framework and console provide a dynamic runtime environment enabling code and content bundles to be loaded, unloaded, and reconfigured at runtime.
Sling, Apache said, makes it easy to implement simple applications while providing an enterprise framework for more complex applications.
A scripting layer using Apache BSF (Bean Scripting Framework) enables Sling to be used with any scripting language. Developers also can use Java and develop applications in RESTful way.
Sling brings content into the Web and provides a platform to manage and upgrade content. It makes use of a Java content repository such as Apache Jackrabbit.
"Sling is intended to bring back the fun to Java developers and make the life of a Web developer easier," an Apache representative said.
"It's really just a framework for building a Web app," said Santi Pierini, senior vice president of marketing at Day Software, which has contributed code for Sling and uses the technology in its Communique' (CQ) content management platform. Sling still is in an incubator stage but could become an official Apache project in a few months, Pierini said.
"We're trying to create a Web framework that makes it easier to build what they call RESTful apps," said Pierini in an interview on Friday morning. With Sling, a content delivery framework and content access capabilities are provided so that developers not have to code these themselves, he said.
Sling can be used for building various types of Web applications, including wikis, blogs, customer self service, and digital asset management systems, Pierini said.
The framework is based on Java Specification Request 170 for Java Content Repositories. That specification features an API for interacting with these repositories. Additionally, an embedded Apache Felix OSGi framework and console provide a dynamic runtime environment enabling code and content bundles to be loaded, unloaded, and reconfigured at runtime.
Sling, Apache said, makes it easy to implement simple applications while providing an enterprise framework for more complex applications.
A scripting layer using Apache BSF (Bean Scripting Framework) enables Sling to be used with any scripting language. Developers also can use Java and develop applications in RESTful way.
Saturday, June 7, 2008
Google Mobile Maps adds mass transit
The mobile version of Google Maps has long ranked among my favorite cellphone applications. It makes it dead easy to find local businesses when I'm on the go.
That said, I've always thought the mobile program should add a major feature from the Web-based version of Google Maps: information about public transit in many major cities -- including Dallas.
The folks at Google apparently agree because they've just added public transit information. This version of Google Maps for mobile even has a few tricks not yet available on the desktop version of Google Maps. For instance, you can find the last transit trips of the day (to figure out how late you can stay at the party) and more easily browse through earlier or later trips. The My Location feature, available on most phones, also makes it easier to set the start point of your journey.
Unfortunately, the upgraded Mobile Maps won't work on all phones that support the older version (including my Motorola Q). It only works for BlackBerry handsets and most other Java-based phones.
If you have such a device and a data plan, you should definitely check out what the program can do and then download it from http://www.google.com/gmm.
That said, I've always thought the mobile program should add a major feature from the Web-based version of Google Maps: information about public transit in many major cities -- including Dallas.
The folks at Google apparently agree because they've just added public transit information. This version of Google Maps for mobile even has a few tricks not yet available on the desktop version of Google Maps. For instance, you can find the last transit trips of the day (to figure out how late you can stay at the party) and more easily browse through earlier or later trips. The My Location feature, available on most phones, also makes it easier to set the start point of your journey.
Unfortunately, the upgraded Mobile Maps won't work on all phones that support the older version (including my Motorola Q). It only works for BlackBerry handsets and most other Java-based phones.
If you have such a device and a data plan, you should definitely check out what the program can do and then download it from http://www.google.com/gmm.
Saturday, May 10, 2008
JavaOne: AMD cites Java improvement efforts
The company promoted its Java support at the JavaOne conference in San Francisco during a keynote presentation. AMD is working on improvements in compilers, operating systems, middleware and development tools as well as Java Virtual Machine improvements. AMD is finding ways to improve Java performance across multi-core environments and has been researching improvements in garbage collection, according to AMD. Garbage collection involves the discarding of objects from memory after they are no longer needed or referenced.
"AMD understands that good software is critical to our product roadmap," said Leendert van Doorn, a senior AMD fellow. Without software, silicon just conducts energy, he said.
Multi-threaded programming "is inherently easier to do in Java," because of Java's built-in support for concurrent programming, van Doorn said.
But there are hurdles to overcome in application performance, said van Doorn. "This is an issue we're working on to help address," he said.
AMD has proposed its Light-Weight Profiling software parallelism specification to help managed code like Java run more efficiently by using continuous performance feedback. Also, AMD's Advanced Synchronization Facility proposal increases software concurrency.
"AMD understands that good software is critical to our product roadmap," said Leendert van Doorn, a senior AMD fellow. Without software, silicon just conducts energy, he said.
Multi-threaded programming "is inherently easier to do in Java," because of Java's built-in support for concurrent programming, van Doorn said.
But there are hurdles to overcome in application performance, said van Doorn. "This is an issue we're working on to help address," he said.
AMD has proposed its Light-Weight Profiling software parallelism specification to help managed code like Java run more efficiently by using continuous performance feedback. Also, AMD's Advanced Synchronization Facility proposal increases software concurrency.
Sunday, April 6, 2008
The Million Dollar SOA Question: Software ESBs or Hardware Appliances?
Service-oriented architectures have now become the norm for IT to deliver value to their respective businesses. A SOA-based approach promises an environment of agility, loosely coupled integration, and a composition-based approach, all of which results in faster adaptability to the demands of the business, lower operational costs, and the increased “pluggability” of standards-based applications. A service is nothing but an abstraction of something that does some business unit of work. This could be something like placing an order, retrieving customer information, or modifying personal information. Technically these services could be exposed with any binding/protocol/interface with request/response parameters being structured or ad-hoc data. Standards-based services have their payloads structured as XML.
In a traditional old school infrastructure, business functions were encompassed in packaged or customized applications with their predefined user interfaces. In a SOA, these traditionally "trapped" business functions tend to add more value when encompassed within a much larger scoped entity and then used by a more modern interaction mechanism. The true emancipation of these business functions required the transition of traditional IT infrastructure toward a new class of technology components. The two major roles of this new services infrastructure are a service brokering role and a gatekeeping role. There are other auxiliary roles, including that of a repository, endpoint management, and some higher-level roles such as orchestration in this new services infrastructure. However, the remainder of this article discusses the primary roles of service brokering and gatekeeping in detail and addresses the different technology components that can fulfill the roles.
In a traditional old school infrastructure, business functions were encompassed in packaged or customized applications with their predefined user interfaces. In a SOA, these traditionally "trapped" business functions tend to add more value when encompassed within a much larger scoped entity and then used by a more modern interaction mechanism. The true emancipation of these business functions required the transition of traditional IT infrastructure toward a new class of technology components. The two major roles of this new services infrastructure are a service brokering role and a gatekeeping role. There are other auxiliary roles, including that of a repository, endpoint management, and some higher-level roles such as orchestration in this new services infrastructure. However, the remainder of this article discusses the primary roles of service brokering and gatekeeping in detail and addresses the different technology components that can fulfill the roles.
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