Direct from Sun's Java® Performance Team, this is a comprehensive field manual full of battle-tested strategies and tactics for developing high-performance applications and applets with Java technology. It covers every aspect of Java performance, including speed, scalability, RAM footprint, startup time, and user-perceived performance factors. Part I covers the crucial process issues associated with Java optimization, outlining how performance tuning fits into the software development process, showing how to use benchmarks and profiling tools to identify hot spots and bottlenecks, and presenting general strategies for enhancing the performance of Java technology-based systems. In Part II, the authors present a wide array of concrete optimization techniques. The book contains detailed appendices on garbage collection and the Java HotSpot® Virtual Machine, written to address key performance questions.

This book addresses a vital issue for all those developing software for the Java® platform: how to achieve maximum performance and scalability for their applications.

Drawing on the authors' knowledge of the Java programming language and their extensive experience working on performance issues, the book reveals common mistakes and misconceptions concerning the performance characteristics of Java technologies. It offers overall development strategies and concrete, battle-tested techniques to dramatically improve the performance of applications constructed with the Java programming language.

Java® Platform Performance highlights the importance of integrating performance evaluation into the application development process and discusses measurement techniques. The book then presents practical tactics for enhancing application performance in the areas of I/O, RAM footprint, small object management, algorithms, data structures, Swing, and deployment. Specific topics covered include:

• Incorporating performance evaluation into the development process
• Profiling and benchmarking
• Building scalable, fast Swing GUIs
• Using high-speed I/O
• Computing and controlling the RAM footprint
• Reducing the number of classes
• Eliminating temporary objects
• Selecting high-performance algorithms and data structures
• Using Java native code and applet packaging efficiently
• Garbage collection
• Java HotSpot® technology

With an understanding of the performance issues and specific techniques for reducing overhead discussed in this book, you will have the information you need to enhance the efficiency, speed, and scalability of your software.