What's New in Excelsior JET 7.2

At A Glance

The major new feature introduced in this release is the Startup Accelerator that enables you to reduce the startup time of large Java applications by a factor of 2.

Excelsior JET 7.2 also reduces build time, speeds up JIT compilation and features usability enhancements.

Startup Accelerator

The newly implemented Startup Accelerator can halve the cold startup time of a large Java application. Its usage is as simple as running the application after compilation on the page Finish of the JET Control Panel. This new feature is also supported in automatic builds.

You may find benchmark results, usage guidelines, and FAQ for the startup optimization on this page.

Build Time Reduction

In our last customer survey, long build times firmly occupied the top spot in the list of annoyances.

You complained, we listened. Our tests show that upgrading to version 7.2 should reduce compilation times by at least 30%. Compilation of large Java applications consisting of tens of thousands of classes can be twice as fast now.

As an extra bonus, building install packages with xpack is about 10% faster.

Usability enhancement

We are sorry it took us so long to fix this. JetPackII projects now use relative paths to reference package files, which eases creation of install packages in automatic builds.

Excelsior JET 7.2 Enterprise Edition includes an Eclipse IDE plug-in that enables you to optimize, protect and package an Eclipse RCP application from within the IDE. For more details, refer to the file

ideplugins/Eclipse/readme.txt

in your Excelsior JET installation directory.

Installation Toolkit Enhancements

During installation, Excelsior Installer now detects if an existing copy of the application being installed is running and prompts the user to close the application first.

Also, if some application files cannot be overwritten, the installer stops gracefully, asking the user to check if they are used by other applications.

Other improvements

Faster JIT compilation (as usual)

The average JIT compilation time for various scenarios has been reduced by 15%.

Java version support

Java SE 6 Update 20 (1.6.0_20) is supported.

Note: As of Excelsior JET 7.2, support for J2SE 5.0 is no longer provided. If you have not yet moved to Java 6, you have to use Excelsior JET 7.0 or one of the prior versions.

Eclipse version support

Support for Eclipse RCP 3.6 RC4 (Helios) is included.

Should any changes be neccessary for interoperability with the final release of Eclipse 3.6, they will be included in the first Excelsior JET 7.2 Maintenance Pack.

Releases prior to 7.2