Terrence Barr - Evangelist, Java Mobile & Embedded wrote:
Shawn,
I have been very involved in this area at Sun now for a couple of
years. Let me add come comments:
Hardware accelerated Java is actually fairly common already, at
least in the Java ME space using ARM's Jazelle technology. It does
have some benefits in very constrained platforms but in general
advanced VMs with dynamic adaptive optimizations, compilation,
and improved garbage collection perform better than H/W acceleration
and at reasonable incremental cost (memory footprint, in particular).
I think what we are seeing here is a general trend in the IT industry
as general-purpose processors become more and more powerful they
displace dedicated hardware solutions because software solutions are
more flexible and lower cost. A notable exception, of course, is
graphics acelleration but Java implementations typically use those
when available.
Specifically to Sun's Java chips (picoJava/microJava): I worked on them
and the performance was quite good. But it is very hard, if not
impossible, to keep up with performance improvements of general
purpose processors together with the increasing amount of memory
available. That technology evolution relegates Java hardware
acceleration to niche status. Many companies have invested in Java
H/W acceleration and fell into that trap.
It turns out to be difficult to make Java go really fast on specialized
hardware. Java wasn't designed to be fast, it was designed to be 'safe'
for large groups of programmers to use. You can get single order of
magnitude speed-ups for some bytecode streams, but you won't see two.
I (too) looked at doing a Java chip (very early, back in 1996 or so).
Moore's law continues to march on, only now instead of (super)-linear
speed-up on a single core, we're getting multiple cores. Java will be
OK with 'multi-core', but won't survive the transition to 'manycore' (>
100 cores), nor will Python, PHP or Perl.
This may not matter on a phone platform, but the desktop and server will
distance themselves from co-operating sequential processes before too
much longer.
As for the comparison of JavaFX Mobile with the iPhone: Sure, at
first it looks like a "me too" play, but I think this applies to
the whole mobile industry. The iPhone was a major wake-up call to
the industry and so I think you will see many "iPhone knock-offs"
over the next 18 months simply because the iPhone is leading the
way.
The only question is if the rest of the industry 'woke up' enough to see
the light of cracking the phone wide-open. If not, they are doomed.
Bill Joy explained it a long time ago.
Lemma 1: # smart employees = log(# of employees)
--> there are more smart people outside your organization than inside it
Lemma 2: Innovation will occur
Lemma 1 tells us that it will occur elsewhere.
Question: How do you take advantage of innovation that occurs outside
the organization?
Answer: Open Source
Of course, FOSS is one answer, there are others, but stating the answer
without knowing the question is Jeopardy!
However, JavaFX Mobile is distinctly different in that it will
be an open system (not closed as the iPhone) and will be part of
a multi-screen approach that delivers content across desktops,
TV, and mobile. Only Java currently has that market reach so Sun would
be ill-advised *not* to capitalize that.
Even then, Java, even JavaFX is not the web.
http://shaver.off.net/diary/2007/05/10/the-high-cost-of-some-free-tools/
Jim
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