Developer(s) Excelsior LLC Development status Active | Initial release 2000 (2000) | |
Stable release 11.3 / November 2, 2016 (2016-11-02) Operating system | ||
Excelsior JET is a proprietary Java SE technology implementation built around an ahead-of-time (AOT) Java to native code compiler. The compiler transforms the portable Java bytecode into optimized executables for the desired hardware and operating system (OS). Also included are a Java runtime featuring a just-in-time (JIT) compiler for handling classes that were not precompiled for whatever reason (e.g. third-party plugins or dynamic proxies), the complete Java SE API implementation licensed from Oracle, and a toolkit to aid deployment of the optimized applications.
Contents
Overview
Excelsior JET has passed the "official" test suite (TCK) for Java SE 8, and is certified Java Compatible on OS X and a number of Windows and Linux flavors running on Intel x86, AMD64/Intel 64 and compatible hardware. (The OS X version is 64-bit only.)
The Enterprise Edition supports the Equinox OSGi runtime at the JVM level, enabling ahead-of-time compilation of Eclipse RCP (Rich Client Platform) applications, and version 7.0 added such support for Web applications running on Apache Tomcat. Version 10.5 introduced a new garbage collector optimized for multi-core and multi-CPU systems
Excelsior JET Embedded implements the Java SE for Embedded technology in a very similar manner. The only major differences used to be in licensing and pricing, but as of the latest version Excelsior JET Embedded also supports ARM-based platforms.
Latest Release
Version 11.3 added support for Linux/ARM targets and Java SE Compact Profiles.