Hewlett-Packard Co says it’s added new technology to the latest version of its Chai embedded Java virtual machine to make the footprint around half the size of the equivalent product offering from Sun Microsystems Inc. HP is also announcing a new set of supporters for the technology when it launches ChaiVM 3.0 at the JavaOne conference in San Francisco today.
ChaiVM 3.0 adds support for loading and executing applets, a smaller memory footprint and a set of new and updated class libraries. It supports JDK 1.1.7 APIs and adds API support for RMI, reflection and object serialization. HP says the single VM scales from low-end applications such as cell phones up to high-end communications and factory automation equipment – in contrast to the three versions that Sun offers. It says the ChaiVM will now fit into 250Kb of memory, rather than the 300Kb required before. An HP spokesperson said he believed Sun’s smallest JVM – EmbeddedJava – required around 500Kb. ChaiVM, he claimed, was one eighth the size of Sun’s PersonalJava.
But HP is also highlighting a new set of algorithms used by ChaiVM that perform on-the-fly dynamic concentration size reduction of Java applications, without loss of functionality or any performance penalty, HP says. Called ChaiFreezeDry, the algorithms have been incorporated into a new space-optimizing class loader that can reduce the memory an application requires by 50% when downloaded to the device. To further cut down memory requirements, HP has also added pruning tools which look at the application and remove any unused classes. The combination, says HP, can reduce the size of a Java application by up to 90%. To prove it, the company plans to demonstrate applications running on a Palm Pilot at JavaOne.
HP has signed up Hitachi Ltd., Omron Software Co Ltd, Road Co, Siemens AG, Thomson Multimedia SA (which sells RCA-label consumer products in the US) and Yokogawa Electric Co to use Chai for their next generation products. Siemens’ Automation and Drives Group has agreed to use the ChaiVM in its Sicomp family of industrial microcomputers under an OEM agreement with Sun. The Sicomp systems, expected to ship this summer, will also be demonstrated at JavaOne this week.
ChaiVM 3.0 began shipping a few weeks ago, on HP-UX, MPE-iX, Linux and Windows NT, with various target real-time operating systems supported. HP says it is a fully-compliant implementation of the Java virtual machine. ChaiFreezeDry will be available later this year, although close partners already have their hands on early versions.
