A free Java Virtual Machine
History and papers
kissme started its life as a Honours project by Stephen Tjasink while he was studying at the University of Cape Town. Initially the JVM was developed for a set-top box that came with a TV Satellite Decoder. To fulfil this goal the JVM was designed to run on a slow processor and with limited memory. One of unconventional aspects of the project was the need to store class files in ROM. The JVM was modified to be able to store the runtime class information on the ROM and then load it again when booting.
When Stephen did his Masters degree the next year, he decided to extend the VM to support orthogonal persistence. Persistent programming languages allow the programmer to indicate which objects in memory should be saved on secondary storage. The runtime (or a compiled in library) will ensure that the data is saved automatically and transparently on disk. When the program restarts it can retrieve this information transparently.
Links on Persistent Java
The PJama project has many links and useful publications.
The modified JVM was called PLaVa and ran persistent Java programs.
For my Honours project in 1999 I extended aspects of PLaVa to support distributed access to its persistent data.
Papers
Stephen Tjasink's Masters thesis "PLAVA: A Persistent Lightweight Java Virtual Machine" (Postscript)
A short paper on accessing persistent data in a distributed fashion
John Leuner - jewel.removeforspam@pixie.co.za
5 August 2000
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