At the Oracle Coherence Special Interest Group meeting today in London, Tomas Nilsson, the product manager for JRockit RT and JRockit Mission Control spoke about the future plans for JRockit and especially plans for improved Coherence JRockit integration.
Coherence and JRockit RT have a lot of common customers, according to Nilsson, so they are looking for ways to provide a better joint offering. Brian Oliver from the Coherence team said that there was always lots that they wanted to do under the hood but couldn’t influence the JVM. Considering that both Tangosol (original producer of Coherence) and BEA (original producer of JRockit) are now owned by the same company, they can now look for ways how to optimise the Java virtual machine to run Coherence better. So far, there has been very little cooperation between the teams but that is now changing. As examples of future improvements, Oliver mentioned the ability to cache JIT for Coherence classes and to push serialisation optimisations into the JVM. However, he stressed out that they are committed to supporting other JVM products as well.
Nilsson mentioned several interesting future improvements to JRockit VM that are in the pipeline at the moment. The most important is probably pause-less garbage collection which will enable administrators to configure the virtual machine never to stop the whole application for garbage collection but just pause individual threads. Oliver pointed out that this will enable them to ensure, for example, that Coherence publisher and receiver threads are never paused for garbage collection. Another useful application of this feature would be to force continuous garbage collection after each task for worker threads, so that garbage collection never happens while a transaction is being processed.
Another interesting upcoming feature is the Root Cause Analysis in JRockit Mission Control, which will automatically compare recorded JVM usage samples with a database of patterns to offer advice for solutions to common problems. The Coherence team is looking into this as well and they might be integrating their own rules into this tool to offer Coherence troubleshooting advice as well.
From a product perspective, Oracle is introducing a new package that will bundle JRockit with Coherence. Web Logic Application Grid or WAG (rather unfortunate choice of an acronym for the UK market). WAG and includes Coherence, JRockit RT, Enterprise Manager, WL Operation Control and WL Application Server. Nilsson also announced a new product from the JRockit family, a virtualisation solution called JRockit VM. The VM is scheduled for release in 2009 and it aims to provide zero-configuration VM deployment (from what I could gather, at least for Oracle’s Java product pool).
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