This release enables you to considerably reduce the disk footprint of your installed Java applications.
Other major improvements are further decrease of the download size of installers created with JetPackII and higher application performance on hardware that supports parallel execution.
Click here for details or download your fully functional Excelsior JET 4.8 Evaluation Package now.
Even before the official announcement of the Sun’s decision to GPL Java, users started asking us how will that affect Excelsior JET. Here is our take on that.
First of all, those are pieces of Java SE 7 early build currently available under GPL. When Java SE 6 goes GA in a few weeks, it will not be GPLed. So nothing may change for us and for you Excelsior JET users until Sun releases full OpenJDK 6 and 7 as they promise in the FAQ.
(Edit: The original post stated Java 6 will not be GPLed, thanks to Shai Almog for forcing me to re-read the Sun FAQ.)
Then, everybody is talking about Sun open sourcing their reference implementations of the Java technology, but few people pay attention to the fact that Sun is not going to open source the respective compatibility tests any time soon. And if your implementation did not pass the compatibility tests, you may not call it Java. Sure, you can get the tests under a scholarship license if you are doing academic research, but if you are making a commercial product, you have to get into a commercial license agreement with Sun, just as we did for J2SE 5.0 and will do for Java SE 6 next year. So nothing will likely change for us and for you Excelsior JET users after Sun releases OpenJDK either.
Finally, the standard Java SE API implementation included in our product JET is actually the natively compiled Sun’s code, so Excelsior JET is a derived work with respect to the reference implementations. That means Excelsior JET would have to be released under the GPL if we want to make an incompatible change such as subset the standard API in order to reduce application’s download size and/or disk footprint. Excelsior JET actually had such a feature prior to compatibility certification, and users keep asking for it, so we are now designing a solution that will solve the problem without breaking compatibility – stay tuned!
That said, right now we see no advantage of switching from SCSL Commercial Use to GPL.
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