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Mea Culpa. Javaworld didn't stop access to its archived articles. More precisely, access was withheld for one week, then restored after someone decided the policy wasn't going to make them a fortune. Well done JavaWorld, and silly old me for writing last month's editorial just when the restriction was in effect.

Swing vs SWT was the hot news this month. Amidst some propaganda for each side, it seems that each has its place. More to the point, it seems like we have Sun backing Swing and IBM backing SWT and the two sides intend to fight it out with each other in trying to make their GUI framework easier to use and faster to respond. Whoopee! Don't ya' just love competition.

We also had the outing of a two year old Sun memo that indicated Sun didn't have Java performance on Solaris as a top priority. Is that really so surprising? Two years ago, Java had only just become the de-facto server-side language, and Sun has never really been that responsive to ongoing Java trends. They've tended to be looking forward to the next best thing, or responding to some torrent or other, rather than concentrating on what today's community wants. That's the kind of attitude that gave us Java in the first place. It's good for the Java community, because it leaves plenty of opportunities for everyone else to service those ongoing trends.

A note from this newsletter's sponsor

I'd like to say that I'm keeping up with all the articles that come out each month. But I can't. The truth is that my backlog continues to grow each month. But on the positive side, that's actually because there are so many articles every month with something to say about Java performance. The articles I have got to this month include a swathe (four!) articles on GC in the IBM JVM, another bunch on performance/capacity management, a couple on J2ME, and others on Swing, XML, JMS and more.

Javva The Hutt talks about infinitely fast computers, and comes to a surprising conclusion; we interview Alex Rossi who successfully scaled a large enterprise Java system seven years ago; our question of the month explains how to choose a profiler; the roundup covers several very interesting questions and answers from performance discussion groups, and, of course, we have all the latest performance tips extracted in concise form.

A note from this newsletter's sponsor

News

Java performance tuning related news.

• Swing vs SWT (by Swing advocate). Read the comments too. Upshot seems to be that Swing can be made fast enough and platform compliant enough, but SWT may be the easier option to get it fast enough if your GUI is simple and/or platform is Windows.
• JSR 203 will add missing NIO components: File system support (better than java.io.File), asynchronous File I/O, and other missing bits.
• Solaris Java was slow (re the 2-year old doc), but fine now
• The 2-year old doc that suggested Sun had better things to do than waste time making Java run fast on Solaris
• Interview about Symbian. Some discussion about peformance. "the biggest mistake a developer can make is assuming that Java on a mobile phone is just like Java on the desktop"
• Borland announces Optimizeit ServerTrace J2EE profiler
• Quest announces version 2.0 of PerformaSure J2EE performance monitor
• GemStone announces new GemFire Suite, optimizes data tranfer across enterprise applications
• Pointbase whitepaper on embedded database, considers performance too

A note from this newsletter's sponsor

Tools

• Version 2.0 of Quest's PerformaSure J2EE performance monitor
• GemStone's GemFire Suite, distributed shared memory for Java

Recent Articles

• BEA JMS performance (Peter Zadrozny/BEA)
• Swing perf community chat (Edward Ort/Sun)
• Preventing Repeated Operations (Mark Johnson/Sun)
• IBM GC 1 (Sam Borman/IBM)
• IBM GC 2 (Sam Borman/IBM)
• IBM GC 3 (Sam Borman/IBM)
• GC (Sumit Chawla/IBM)
• floating point and decimal numbers (Brian Goetz/IBM)
• Performance of networked J2ME apps (Michael Abernethy/IBM)
• XML data binding performance (Dennis M. Sosnoski/IBM)
• Manage Java apps for premium performance (Peter Bochner/ADTMagazine)
• Four Critical Issues for Mobile Apps Developers (Alan Zeichick/DevX)
• Concise Guide to WebSphere Capacity Management (Ruth Willenborg Stacy Joines/e-ProMag.com)
• Web service management (Justin Murray/DevX)
• Applying Design Issues and Patterns in Web Services (Chris Peltz/DevX)

Older Articles

• Monitoring Performance with WebSphere (Ruth Willenborg/e-ProMag.com)

Jack Shirazi

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