Releasing the Multi-Tasking Virtual Machine

Welcome to my blog! I would like to invite you to take a look at the just released Multi-Tasking Virtual Machine. The actual technology has proven relatively easy to implement and the original release was planned for early 2005. Well, so much for the plans. A whole bunch of items crept in, all the way from legal issue to handling large code releases on java.net. I guess for a while my replies to just about any questions about software engineering will contain something like "... and never underestimate the time it takes to release code!". OK, enough about the process behind this release, let's go back to MVM.

MVM is a research modification of Sun's implementation of J2SE 5.0. In particular, it implements the second Public Review version of the JSR 121, also known as the Application Isolation API. This API adds the analog of a traditional operating system's address space abstraction (the Isolate class) to the Java Platform, thereby endowing it with a principled and easily used process model.

MVM has already proven itself in the CLDC space and now our team at the Sun Microsystems Laboratories is looking into ways MVM can improve J2SE and J2EE. People interested in the scalability of the Java platform will find MVM's start-up time and memory footprint reductions to be its most interesting aspects. Other users are likely to focus on (and hopefully like) the Application Isolation API, which in turn enables other technologies, leading to a more complete and programmable Java platform.

We plan to improve on this initial release. We will add a resource management facility, a clustering API, and a service management API and will update the Application Isolation API when its standardization is complete. Work on removing some of the current limitations, and tuning the implementation is also underway.

We are very interested in feedback and suggestions - please share your thoughts with us. Please note that you'll need to get the JDK Researcher role to be able to download MVM.