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Earlier this year, Sun Microsystems swung back into profit after five consecutive quarterly losses. That didn't help the share price, it went down. They announced innovative new products. That didn't help the share price, it went down. They announced a share buy-back. That didn't help the share price, it went down. This month, they changed the company ticker name (the four character name under which the company is registered in the stock market) from SUNW to JAVA. The share price finally went up.

So much for the "efficient market hypothesis" (the idea that everything known about a stock is already in the price). This is a market lead by sentiment - and clearly the sentiment towards Java is pretty positive. (Those of you interested in a bit of trivia, the SUNW ticker name was chosen as an acronym from 'Stanford University Network Workstation'.)

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So what does all that tell us? Two things. First, Java is still the place to be. And second, guessing what will move a share price - and which way it will go if it does move - is a mugs game. So, now on with important stuff: this month's newsletter. This month, Kirk has taken a look at Javascript performance. Yes, we know JavaScript is not Java, but it is increasingly used on the client side for a lot of Java apps, so of interest. In addition we have our usual news, article links, tools, and extracted tips. Javva the Hutt tells us about how he analysed his threads after reading Heinz Kabutz's advice; and, of course we have extracted all the tips from those articles.

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News

Java performance tuning related news.

• 64-bit JVM is slower than the 32-bit
• Details of Java Kernel from Consumer JRE.
• AsyncGetCallTrace in the JVM that lets you get a stack trace asynchronously (from JNI)
• Kirk Pepperdine is ported to netbeans
• Glassfish 9.1 hits the top spot on SPECjAppServer Performance on T2000
• Jennifer application performance management (APM) solution

Tools

Java performance tuning related tools.

• Macro 4's Application Performance Portal
• Jennifer application performance management (APM) solution
• p-unit open source framework for unit test and performance benchmarking
• TestMaker 5.0, open source platform to test, monitor, and govern information systems

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Articles

• Javascript Performance (Kirk Pepperdine/fasterj.com)
• The Law of the Distracted Spearfisherman (Dr. Heinz M. Kabutz/Java Specialists' Newsletter)
• Multithreaded XML Transformations (Todd Lauinger/devX.com)
• The Challenges of Latency (Dan Pritchett/infoQ)
• How to test container scalability (Scott Oaks/java.net)
• Making a JMX connection with a timeout (Eamonn McManus/java.net)
• Spin Buffers (Prashanth Hirematada/DrDobbs)

Jack Shirazi

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