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Eric Bruno's article on The Future of Java, published in Dr. Dobbs (see our news items below) has the following fascinating assertion:

"the Java virtual machine (JVM) will execute applications written in Java, Rexx, Ruby, JavaScript, Python, PHP Groovy, Clojure, and Scala. In many cases, Sun's HotSpot JVM will run these applications better than their natively compiled counterparts because the just-in-time (JIT) compiler will re-optimize the compiled code over time according to execution characteristics"

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In my opinion it will increasingly be the case that the JVM will be the platform of choice for new scripting languages because it runs them well, runs them fast, and you get automatic benefit of the underlying JVM improvements without any effort on your part. The future of programming is increasingly dynamic (though slowly, currently dynamic languages are too difficult to maintain for large-scale projects to make any speedy inroads into the static language dominant status), and that means the JVM is here to stay. Or rather the MVM (Multi-language VM) as it will eventually become.

But for now, I'm still firmly in the Java language camp and not rushing to write in any scripting language. I think I'll wait for a better dynamic language to come along than any of the existing ones - one that has a focus on being maintainable and highly concurrent.

Now on with this month's newsletter. We have all our usual Java performance tools, news, and article links. Over at fasterj we have a new cartoon on synchronizing to avoid race conditions; Javva The Hutt continues to tell us about his new role; and, as usual, we have extracted tips from all of this month's referenced articles.

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News

Java performance tuning related news.

• interesting discourse on scrolling behavior (efficiency requires good UI behavior).
• the current state of escape analysis
• Ehcache 2.0 released
• Useful roundup of Oracle changes expected for the JVM, with good focus on expected performance enhancements
• AppDynamics APM performance management product

Tools

Java performance tuning related tools.

• AppDynamics application performance management and monitoring
• MonkeyWrench Java profiling application
• Speed Tracer tool to help you identify and fix performance problems in your web applications
• OKTECH Profiler low-impact sampling and instrumentation profiler for Java
• Jmxterm is a command line based interactive JMX client (command line jconsole).

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Articles

• How FarmVille Scales - The Follow-up (Todd Hoff/highscalability)
• Garbage Collection, [Soft]References, Finalizers and the Memory Model (Jeremy Manson/jeremymanson)
• The many faces of end-user experience monitoring (Alois Reitbauer/dynatrace)
• Rethinking Multi-Threaded Design Principles (Dibyendu Roy/java.net)
• Has JDBC Kept up with Enterprise Requirements? (Jesse Davis/java.net)
• Memory Barriers and JVM Concurrency (Dennis Byrne/InfoQ)

Jack Shirazi

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