What's New in Excelsior JET 7.0

At A Glance

Excelsior JET 7.0 enables you to protect Web applications running on Apache Tomcat against reverse engineering and IP theft, and distribute them without the original class/WAR files and without dependency on the JDK.

Another new feature introduced in this release is multi-app executables. With it, you may compile several applications into a single executable to simplify deployment and maximize code and data sharing without manually "extracting" common parts into dynamic libraries.

This release also features improved application performance and an important usability enhancement.

Last, but not least, Windows 7 is included in the list of supported platforms.

Protection of Tomcat Web applications

In the previous versions of Excelsior JET, many Tomcat applications could be only handled via the JIT compiler that comes with the JET Runtime, just like it is done by the standard JRE.

Unfortunately, that approach did not provide any IP protection as the application classes had to be distributed in the original bytecode form.

With Excelsior JET 7.0, the Tomcat Server can be compiled directly to a native code executable together with the deployed Web applications, and distributed without the original class/WAR files.

Multi-app executables

Now you may compile more than one application into a single executable and select a particular application at launch time via the command line arguments of the executable. This option enables you to:

• maximize code and data sharing among applications
• apply the Global Optimizer to several applications at once
• specify Java system properties and VM options on the command line (which may justify the usage of this feature even for a single application)
• on Windows, run the same executable as both conventional application and service

For details, please refer to the Excelsior JET User’s Guide, Chapter “Application considerations”, section “Multi-app executables”

Usability enhancement

With the previous versions of Excelsior JET, some applications did not work unless certain library jars and/or the rt.jar file were available at run time.

That was the case for the applications including such components as JasperReports, Apache AXIS, javac or Eclipse JDT compilers, etc. The root cause is that the mentioned components use the original .class files as input data and therefore require their presence for proper operation.

As a result, users had to make special settings for some jars in the JET Control Panel and JetPackII, which was not obvious, not to mention that it increased the size of the installation package and weakened protection.

Now it is no longer required.

Improved application performance

In our results, 1.3x to 2x performance improvement has been achieved for some tests from the EEMBC, DaCapo, and SPECjvm2008 benchmark suites. Your mileage may of course vary.

Installation Toolkit enhancements

• Windows services can now be run immediately after installation
• JetPackII now accepts script files for Trial Run. It enables trial run testing for compiled applications that need a special environment to run, e.g. setting some environment variables, starting other processes, etc.

New platforms

Excelsior JET 7.0 has passed Java SE 6 compliance tests on Windows 7, which is now included in the list of supported operating systems.

Other improvements

Better optimization

In the previous versions of Excelsior JET, machine-generated and heavily obfuscated class files used to be compiled with a lower optimization level, which might lead to performance degradation.

Now this drawback has been eliminated, thanks to many Excelsior JET community members who pointed our attention to this problem and reported the respective issues to us.

Lower memory usage

Thanks to a more effective implementation of Java finalization.

Support for latest Java SE updates

Java SE 6 Update 16 (default) and J2SE 5.0 Update 21 are supported.

Note: Excelsior JET 7.0 is the last version with support for J2SE 5.0

Releases prior to 7.0