Java Gets Smaller And Smarter

May 25, 2006

Sun Microsystems showed off its new Java Platform Standard Edition (Java SE) and an early access release of Java Real-Time System version 2.0 at San Jose's Embedded Systems Conference last month. The reduced-footprint Java SE platform now uses less t

William G. Wong

Sun Microsystems showed off its new Java Platform Standard Edition (Java SE) and an early access release of Java Real-Time System version 2.0 at San Jose's Embedded Systems Conference last month.

The reduced-footprint Java SE platform now uses less than 23 Mbytes. Also, Sun's Java virtual machine (JVM) tuning service can improve performance from 25% to 200%. Adjustments that might be employed include the use of different garbage-collection models as well as the use of different JVM settings based upon the type of applications that will use the JVM.

Version 2.0 of the Java Real-Time System has its own JVM that implements the Real Time Java Standard (RTSJ). It can incorporate a real-time garbage-collection system based on work from the University of Lund in Sweden. One trick is to move the garbage collector to a lower-priority task so high-priority, real-time tasks are now interrupted.

The JVM supports the Java 5 features. It initially will run on x86 and x64 Solaris and realtime Linux systems.

Sun Microsystems
www.sun.com

About the Author

William G. Wong | Senior Content Director - Electronic Design and Microwaves & RF

I am Editor of Electronic Design focusing on embedded, software, and systems. As Senior Content Director, I also manage Microwaves & RF and I work with a great team of editors to provide engineers, programmers, developers and technical managers with interesting and useful articles and videos on a regular basis. Check out our free newsletters to see the latest content.

You can send press releases for new products for possible coverage on the website. I am also interested in receiving contributed articles for publishing on our website. Use our template and send to me along with a signed release form.

Check out my blog, AltEmbedded on Electronic Design, as well as his latest articles on this site that are listed below.

You can visit my social media via these links:

I earned a Bachelor of Electrical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology and a Masters in Computer Science from Rutgers University. I still do a bit of programming using everything from C and C++ to Rust and Ada/SPARK. I do a bit of PHP programming for Drupal websites. I have posted a few Drupal modules.

I still get a hand on software and electronic hardware. Some of this can be found on our Kit Close-Up video series. You can also see me on many of our TechXchange Talk videos. I am interested in a range of projects from robotics to artificial intelligence.