Although in the short term, development will continue in parallel on both the Sun HotSpot Java Virtual Machine (JVM) and the JRockit JVM that Oracle acquired from BEA Systems, the most informed speculation is that, eventually, a single JVM based on both technologies is expected within the coming 18 months to two years, or so writes Paul Krill in InfoWorld.

According to Oracle Principal Engineer Mark Reinhold, "It's not an easy problem taking the best of each, figuring out what the long-term convergence plan is. We're not going to just stop doing one of them. Customers have things in production on both, taking advantage of specific features in both. We're not going to cause an earthquake and make systems fall over. At some point in time, I expect there will be one VM," Reinhold continued, estimating a one-and-a-half years to two years timeframe.

There is substantial differentiation in these two JVMs. Of JRockit, Reinhold says, "There's stuff in JRockit that, frankly, we've been jealous of for some years. The mission control stuff is very sweet."

HotSpot, on the other hand, has an advantage in pushing of performance, said Reinhold. "Our sense with the HotSpot code, especially the server compiler, is there's a lot more head room there. It's a lot more-sophisticated system," he said.

Reinhold foresees the merged VM as having the JRockit garbage collector and serviceability, the HotSpot runtime compiler and a mixed runtime system. "It's been fascinating to learn more about JRockit over the last couple of months. It really is a world-class VM," said Reinhold.

Also up for discussion is the planned Java Development Kit 7, which serves as the next version of the standard edition of Java. Reinhold cited its modularity and multilingual capabilities as well as intentions to make it a more productive platform and have it scale down to small devices.

Java platform developers intend to incorporate efforts from Project Coin, which pertains to small language changes, into JDK 7, Reinhold noted. Recently Reinhold chatted with Justin Kestelyn, senior director of Oracle Technology Network, about why the typical Java developer should be excited about JDK 7.

More Information

Oracle's ambitious plans for integrating Sun's technology

Engineers sweat Oracle's Sun-Java integration promise

TechCast Live: Mark Reinhold's JDK 7 Roundup - Webcast runs 29:06 [...read more...]

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