In last month’s roadmap session, Oracle said that it planned to combine Sun HotSpot Java Virtual Machine with the JRockit JVM; now it has added some details to those plans during a recent Webcast.
Oracle’s Mark Reinhold, a former Sun employee, said that the company plans to continue developing both technologies for now, but will release a combined product within eighteen months to two years. “It’s not an easy problem taking the best of each, figuring out what the long-term convergence plan is,” said Reinhold. “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.”
He added that both technologies have advantages. While HotSpot has the edge in performance, “there’s stuff in JRockit that, frankly, we’ve been jealous of for some years,” he said. “The mission control stuff is very sweet.”
