BEA Systems and the Eclipse Foundation are making their marks at the JavaOne conference this week, focusing on JVMs and open source projects, respectively.
BEA Systems is preparing to take its JRockit Java Virtual Machine to new platforms. By the end of this year, you"ll start seeing it come out on other processors, such as Sparc, said Mark Carges, BEA CTO, during an interview at the JavaOne conference in San Francisco.
Currently running on Windows and Linux on Intel and AMD chips, plans call for porting the JVM to the Solaris OS on Sparc, AIX on PowerPC, and HP-UX on Intel. The Sparc-Solaris version is expected by the end of 2005, with the others to follow.
JRockit has been available as a free download. BEA hopes to monetize the JVM by selling operational and diagnostic tools, such as memory-leak detectors that function with JRockit on top of BEA"s commercial WebLogic middleware platform, Carges said.
BEA also anticipates having JRockit participate in a stack that would feature WebLogic on top of JRockit, which would reside above "hypervisor" software for running device drivers. Beneath that would be Intel"s planned virtualization chips that would support multiple OSes on a single piece of silicon, Carges said.
The stack is expected to offer superior performance, he added. BEA is calling this project "Bare Metal."
Also at JavaOne, BEA announced Arc2Arc, a program enabling enterprise architects to share expertise, case studies, and perspectives on implementing information technology to meet business requirements. The company also announced that an enhanced version of BEA dev2dev developer site has gone live. The site features blogs from developers, expanded technical content, Wiki Webs, and content syndication. Free trials of WebLogic JRockit 5.0 are featured.
Eclipse also announced the release of the Eclipse Platform 3.1, the main Eclipse platform. Other Eclipse projects will be released within 30 days, including Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools, Web Tools, Test and Performance Tools, Graphical Editor Framework, Visual Editor, AspectJ for aspect-oriented programming, and the Eclipse Modeling Framework.
"It"s really quite an accomplishment for the Eclipse open source community to ship all these projects all at once on a coordinated schedule," said Eclipse Executive Director Mike Milinkovich.
Eclipse this week also is shipping its Rich Client Platform 3.1, for building rich client applications that are not Web-based. Version 3.1 features improved tooling for building and managing rich clients.