Monday, December 20, 2004

JRockit Needs Refinement

I had heard of good comments on BEA's JRockit JVM. I tried it last Friday when 5.0 just came out. It started my Eclipse 3.0 development environment OK. I poked around in it a little bit and noticed no difference in performance compared to JDK 1.4.2. Well, it's a server JVM anyway right? Then why does it take over as the default JVM after installation? I made sure to check off the right boxes so that it would not be installed in any of the browsers. Then as soon as I started a JUnit test, an error message came to say the debugger could not be connected to. There is no such problem with either JDK 1.4.2 or 1.5.0. I also tried JRcokit 5.0 on Linux (Gentoo with kernel 2.6.9) on Tomcat 5.5.4 and Confluence. It failed on the known problem of it with CGLib. To conclude: although I had high hope, JRockit 5.0 needs refinement before I can use it. I hope BEA fixes it soon.