BEA has announced that JRockit is "hotter than ever before," including hotter than Sun's HotSpot. When deploying SOA on a JVM, the company says, nothing comes close to matching the reliability, scalability, manageability and simplicity of JRockit. And BEA says it has the benchmarks to prove it.

In August, BEA announced that WebLogic Server 9.0 and JRockit 5.0 "smoked" the competition with a record 1,374.11 jAppServer Operations Per Second (JOPS) and did so using only half of the application server's CPUs and memory required for the previous record. SPECjAppServer2004 is an industry-standard benchmark specifically designed to measure the scalability and performance of Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) technology-based application servers.

Comparing two SPECjbb2000 industry-standard JVM benchmarks from April and June, 2005, on similar systems, JRockit scored 296,179 operations per second (ops/s) against 197,545 ops/s for HotSpot. Both tests were run on eight cores on four chips (two cores per chip), but the HotSpot test used a 14.3 gigabyte heap while the JRockit test used only a 1.8 gigabyte heap.

"In plain English," the company says in an announcement, "WebLogic Server 9.0 and JRockit 5.0 do more work for half the price, and JRockit can run 50 percent faster than HotSpot with one-eighth the heap size."

Vinit "Vinny" Carpenter (pictured), a developer and publisher of Vinny Carpenter's Blog, has been a JRockit user for three years and is scheduled to participate in a BEAWorld panel discussion, hosted by Bruce Graham, vice president of worldwide consulting, BEA Systems, Inc. The panel is scheduled for Tuesday, Sept. 27, at the Santa Clara Convention Center.

"I've played with most of the JVMs out there over the years and settled on JRockit because it's fast, stable and efficient," said Carpenter. "As companies make the shift to SOA, JRockit is perfectly positioned to adapt and respond to developers' needs." 

TrueCredit (http://www.truecredit.com), a division of TransUnion that offers credit reporting, credit scoring and related financial services to consumers via web-based applications, is a current BEA customer and attests to the performance advantages of JRockit.

"TrueCredit needed a real-time solution for its credit reporting services that could support thousands of users simultaneously," said Scott Metzger, chief technology officer, TrueCredit. "After a detailed review of several possible deployment platforms, we selected Intel Itanium 2-based enterprise servers and the BEA JRockit JVM to develop and deploy its WebLogic applications. Because JRockit is optimized to run on Intel platforms, we were assured superior performance and application availability without spending a lot of money on proprietary UNIX hardware."

JRockit is the highest performance JVM and optimized to run on Intel Xeon and Intel Itanium 2 Servers, and the software's performance superiority is driving rapid adoption throughout the industry. In terms of application servers running JRockit on Intel Itanium hardware, JBoss recommends it, Oracle certifies it for the Linux platform, and both Red Hat and SUSe distribute it.

While these vendors do employ other JVMs, their support of JRockit - says BEA - speaks volumes about the software's performance, optimization and safety.

"It is gratifying to see such an aggressive uptake of JRockit," said Guy Churchward, general manager, Java Runtime Products Group (JRPG), BEA Systems, Inc. "The focus we've given to mission-critical server-side Java application deployment with rock solid reliability, granular instrumentation and industry leading performance was intended to help provide businesses with the surest way to achieve a fast, successful SOA implementation."

Of course BEA knows that speed, reliability, simplicity and market share are meaningless without a strong developer community and developer relevant features, and BEA has one of the best. JRockit features include run-time analyzer and memory leak detection tools that provide production diagnostics with little or no impact to production systems while providing developers with the capability to pinpoint issues down to the line of source code. This tool makes it easy for developers to find and correct very small or very slow memory leaks that prove almost impossible and extremely costly to replicate in development and test environments.

Dev2Dev is a community by developers for developers, loaded with blogs, newsgroups, product information, code sharing, feature articles and online training. Share a JRockit story on Dev2Dev. BEA has started an area where JRockit users can talk about their user experiences running the software on Intel architecture-based platforms.

BEA JRockit 5.0 has been specifically architected for use by large-scale, mission-critical, server-side applications running on high-performing Intel processor-based servers, says BEA. The latest software release includes 64-bit support for the Intel Xeon processor. Featuring what the company calls a range of state-of-the-art capabilities, JRockit 5.0 is designed "to help customers deploy their applications quickly and efficiently so they can achieve optimal performance." Developers using JRockit 5.0, says BEA, can aim for "higher levels of productivity, manageability, performance and stability."