Henrik Stahl has pointed out that JRockit 5.0 for Solaris SPARC is available. This is a Java Standard Edition 5.0-compatible JVM for 64-bit Solaris 9, and "Solaris 10 should work as well." Henrik says in his blog entry that performance is roughly on par with Sun's 64-bit JVM for the platform, with performance enhancements planned for the future, so the primary benefit is currently in the area of manageability.

In your Humble Editor's experience, JRockit's an excellent VM, and on Windows its performance is stellar. In a Tech Talk with Staffan Larsen conducted by TSS and published on BEA's dev2dev site, some possible compatibility issues were pointed out, mostly related to poorly-specified issues with reflection, and some products require specific JVMs to run, but generally, JRockit has been an excellent platform for server-side applications, even running non-BEA application servers. Since I use Solaris 9 on SPARC as a desktop OS, I'm definitely happy about the release.

If the JRockit team is able to get performance enhancements on SPARC similar to the x86 platform's enhancements - which may be a challenge, considering that the enhancements were tailored to the Intel platform - it'll be a fantastic JVM for SPARC as well. The issues with reflection are more client code relying on incorrect behavior rather than an actual problem with JRockit, so as time goes by and JRockit gains even more acceptance, the client code quality is likely to go up.

My first hand experience testing JRockit with Tomcat tells me JRockit is a solid JVM. One thing that I notice is that JRockit is able to optimize bad or slow applications more than SUN JVM. When an application is well written and optimized, there's no difference in performance. Congrats to the JRockit team.

peter

Just make sure you read the disclaimer in my blog :-) Performance is ok compared to the 64-bit Sun JVM, but not as good as the 32-bit Sun JVM. Focus has been on stability for obvious reasons. We will work more on performance moving forward.

Henrik

Congratulations to the JRockit team. This is excellent news, and should be good for Java. We've had excellent experiences with JRockit as a server-side operating system, regarding stability as well as throughput, and it's good to have that option on another important platform.

Rgds
Rod

Is there any hope for a FreeBSD port?

Regards,
Luis Neves

Not short-term, I'm afraid. There is a significant cost in doing a JVM port to a new architecture and/or OS, and we have no customer demand for FreeBSD. Would be fun to do, though, but if it were up to me I'd do OpenBSD first ;-)

Henrik, JRockit team

Not short-term, I'm afraid. There is a significant cost in doing a JVM port to a new architecture and/or OS, and we have no customer demand for FreeBSD.

Yes, I see your point, but I seems to me that this a chicken and egg problem.
The low customer demand you are seeing is due to the fact that there is no official port of Java for FreeBSD so no uses FreeBSD/Java.
FreeBSD is a heavily used server OS, BEA could fill the niche of being the only viable JVM for FreeBSD and that seems a good place to be.

Remember that circa 2002 Yahoo (which uses mainly FreeBSD) choose PHP over Java primarily because the lack of decent Java support (truth be told that at the time FreeBSD's threading sucked).
And I personally know of other cases where Java was ditched because of this.
I guess what I'm saying is:

Built it and they will come.

Regards,
Luis Neves

Remember that circa 2002 Yahoo (which uses mainly FreeBSD) choose PHP over Java primarily because the lack of decent Java support (truth be told that at the time FreeBSD's threading sucked).

FWIW Yahoo uses lots of Java.

Peace,

Cameron Purdy
Tangosol Coherence: Clustered Shared Memory for Java

Hi

Does anyone know when JRockit will be available for AIX ? Our enterprise applications run on Weblogic 8.1 on AIX 5L 5.3 ML02. and we would like to test for memory leaks on WLS 8.1. We do not intend to upgrade to WLS 9.x this year.
Chandan

We're constantly evaluating our platform support matrix based on customer demand, and the interest for AIX has been relatively low. We have done some work on an AIX port, but can not allocate resources to finish it unless this changes.

Henrik Ståhl
Product Manager, JRockit

hi Chandan, We have currently weblogic 7 on AIX. We want to move to weblogic 9. Can you update me on did u move to weblogic 9 on AIX ?? Are there any issues with JDK 5 on AIX?? Please help.