Skip to main content

What is Consumer JRE, Java Kernel

The JRE 1.6 update 10 around the corner. Sun's Initiative to slim down a huge 14 MB JRE download is very much understandable to keep itself in competition. But for an average joe, How would this matter? There is some confusion in understanding what is this release about. Why is this in minor release update? What is expected? Why now?

Java Kernel, has been in talks for a while now. Why now - because with AIR, SilverLight taking on RIA market, Java cannot lag behind sticking to its thick client apis (AWT,SWT). But here is the thing, This release hass no change in API. Its just a new JRE implementation.

Okay What is it? The JRE consists of a bootstrap library and a bunch of system, language and util libraries. There may be inter dependencies in these libraries. Making the smallest possible JRE that can start on itself is the Java Kernel. After You get java kernel, Consider that a java program is asking for some dependencies, The Java Kernel *downloads* it and loads in the program for you. So its *gradually* getting the complete JRE over time. This way, A system that doesn't have JRE at all, can start loading an application/applet with a bare minimum start up time.

Does it effect you? Yes and No. Technically, you wont even bother about this change. as it is an implementation difference. but performance and deployment wise, it would give you more bang for the buck in User experience. Like say an applet can be made a web start program just like that. and to run a small web start program you need not have the customer load a huge VM.

What is Expected? If you are familiar with OSGi philosophy, you can compare this modularisation with that philosophy. Right now, Sun's move is only the first step. Moving forward, this modularisation will only benefit The experience. Having said that, One can attribute this move only to the lazy-ness of Sun, waiting on others to innovate and Sun playing only the catch up. However, its good for java community.

If you are keen on reading more technical details. Read here.
Labels:

Popular posts from this blog

Powered By

As it goes, We ought to give thanks to people who power us. This page will be updated, like the version page , to show all the tools, and people this site is Powered By! Ubuntu GIMP Firebug Blogger Google [AppEngine, Ajax and other Apis] AddtoAny Project Fondue jQuery
Read More >>

Decorator for Memcache Get/Set in python

I have suggested some time back that you could modularize and stitch together fragments of js and css to spit out in one HTTP connection. That makes the page load faster. I also indicated that there ways to tune them by adding cache-control headers. On the server-side however, you could have a memcache layer on the stitching operation. This saves a lot of Resources (CPU) on your server. I will demonstrate this using a python script I use currently on my site to generate the combined js and css fragments. So My stitching method is like this @memize(region="jscss") def joinAndPut(files, ext): res = files.split("/") o = StringIO.StringIO() for f in res: writeFileTo(o, ext + "/" + f + "." + ext) #writes file out ret = o.getvalue() o.close() return ret; The method joinAndPut is * decorated * by memize. What this means is, all calls to joinAndPut are now wrapped (at runtime) with the logic in memize. All you wa...
Read More >>

Faster webpages with fewer CSS and JS

Its easy, have lesser images, css and js files. I will cover reducing number of images in another post. But If you are like me, You always write js and css in a modular fashion. Grouping functions and classes into smaller files (and Following the DRY rule, Strictly!). But what happens is, when you start writing a page to have these css and js files, you are putting them in muliple link rel=style-sheet or script tags. Your server is being hit by (same) number of HTTP Requests for each page call. At this point, its not the size of files but the number server roundtrips on a page that slows your page down. Yslow shows how many server roundtrips happen for css and js. If you have more than one css call and one js call, You are not using your server well. How do you achieve this? By concatinating them and spitting out the content as one stream. So Lets say I have util.js, blog.js and so.js. If I have a blog template that depends on these three, I would call them in three script tags. Wh...
Read More >>