JPC - winner most mentally brilliant thing I saw at JavaOne

At JavaOne you always seen some crap presentations and you see some great presentations on things that you will never actually use in the real world. Then occasionally you wander into a presentation where people have done something in Java that is truly mental but actually has a point.

Welcome to JPC, the Java PC emulator. Yup you can run an x86 PC on top of a JVM, including running Linux. Okay so it isn't fast but this does give a great demonstration how mentally powerful modern machines are. The clever bit is around the work that they have done around compiling the x86 code into VM code.

The presenters did a good job of describing a very complex area such as compiler design and the pieces that they did.

Why though isn't this just another crazy concept that you will never use? Well first off it means that you can run x86 on any VM platform, this is important because just think in 20 years time, will x86 code from 1990 still run on the modern hardware? Quite probably not so it gives a great addition for future security of archives. The other bit where it wins over a virtualisation solution is that you could run it as a minor slave on a box rather than having to virtualise everything. If you have some ancient DOS programme that just processes and dumps a file or has a very basic green screen interface than you don't have to virtualise the entire platform before you can run it, you can just run a VM and have the application running along side the main OS. This could be quite a nice way of deploying those old crappy DOS applications on the new shiny hardware and doing that in a way that doesn't require expensive virtualisation of all those new shiny terminals.

It also has a great case (which is why a bunch of physics people did it) around grid computing as a way to provide a more scalable approach to distributing applications that can utilise downtime without requiring a local install and thus giving a nice secure environment (the JVM) for that grid code to operate in. This is one of the few (hell I think its the ONLY) practical ways I've seen to deploy a multi-purpose grid in a secure sand-boxed environment for any hardware (they demo'ed it on mobile phones, sort of like the iPod supercomputer concept but without the hardware hack).

In the presentation they actually set up a grid with people in the room, that is confidence on quality.

Oh and they are claiming they can get to 50% of the native machine in performance.... Java is so slow that it runs a PC at half speed.... in a browser window.

Mental, very clever and something you could even see a use for.

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