Kaffe is a discontinued " clean room design" (

reverse engineering Reverse engineering (also known as backwards engineering or back engineering) is a process or method through which one attempts to understand through deductive reasoning how a previously made device, process, system, or piece of software accompli ...

) version of a

Java Virtual Machine A Java virtual machine (JVM) is a virtual machine that enables a computer to run Java programs as well as programs written in other languages that are also compiled to Java bytecode. The JVM is detailed by a specification that formally describ ...

. It comes with a subset of the

Java Platform, Standard Edition Java Platform, Standard Edition (Java SE) is a computing platform for development and deployment of portable code for desktop and server environments. Java SE was formerly known as Java 2 Platform, Standard Edition (J2SE). The platform uses J ...

(Java SE), Java API, and

tool A tool is an object that can extend an individual's ability to modify features of the surrounding environment or help them accomplish a particular task. Although many animals use simple tools, only human beings, whose use of stone tools dates ba ...

s needed to provide a

Java Java (; id, Jawa, ; jv, ꦗꦮ; su, ) is one of the Greater Sunda Islands in Indonesia. It is bordered by the Indian Ocean to the south and the Java Sea to the north. With a population of 151.6 million people, Java is the world's mo ...

runtime environment. Like most other Free Java virtual machines, Kaffe uses GNU Classpath as its class library. Kaffe, first released in 1996, was the original open-source Java implementation. Initially developed as part of another project, it grew so popular that developers Tim Wilkinson and Peter Mehlitz founded Transvirtual Technologies, Inc. with Kaffe as the company's flagship product. In July 1998, Transvirtual released Kaffe OpenVM under a

GNU General Public License The GNU General Public License (GNU GPL or simply GPL) is a series of widely used free software licenses that guarantee end user In product development, an end user (sometimes end-user) is a person who ultimately uses or is intended to ulti ...

. Kaffe is a lean and portable

virtual machine In computing, a virtual machine (VM) is the virtualization/ emulation of a computer system. Virtual machines are based on computer architectures and provide functionality of a physical computer. Their implementations may involve specialized har ...

, although it is significantly slower than commercial implementations. When compared to the reference implementation of the Java Virtual Machine written by

Sun Microsystems Sun Microsystems, Inc. (Sun for short) was an American technology company that sold computers, computer components, software, and information technology services and created the Java programming language, the Solaris operating system, ZFS, ...

, Kaffe is significantly smaller; it thus appeals to

embedded system An embedded system is a computer system—a combination of a computer processor, computer memory, and input/output peripheral devices—that has a dedicated function within a larger mechanical or electronic system. It is ''embedded'' ...

developers. It comes with just-in-time compilers for many of the CPU architectures, and has been

port A port is a maritime facility comprising one or more wharves or loading areas, where ships load and discharge cargo and passengers. Although usually situated on a sea coast or estuary, ports can also be found far inland, such as ...

ed to more than 70 system platforms in total. It runs on devices ranging from embedded

SuperH SuperH (or SH) is a 32-bit reduced instruction set computing (RISC) instruction set architecture (ISA) developed by Hitachi and currently produced by Renesas. It is implemented by microcontrollers and microprocessors for embedded systems. At t ...

devices to IBM zSeries

mainframe computer A mainframe computer, informally called a mainframe or big iron, is a computer used primarily by large organizations for critical applications like bulk data processing for tasks such as censuses, industry and consumer statistics, enterpris ...

s, and it will even run on a PlayStation 2. Unlike other implementations, in the past Kaffe used GNU Multi-Precision Library (GMP) to support arbitrary precision arithmetics. This feature has been removed from release 1.1.9, causing protests from people that claim they used Kaffe for the sole reason GMP arithmetic being faster than the typical pure java implementation, available in other distributions. The capability was removed to reduce the maintenance work, expecting that interested people will integrate GMP support into GNU Classpath or OpenJDK. Subsequently GNU Classpath introduced GMP support in version 0.98.

References

External links

*
Transvirtual Adopts Microsoft Java Extensions, October 1st, 1999 by Craig Knudsen
{{Java (software platform) Discontinued Java virtual machines Free compilers and interpreters

See also

References

External links