Excelsior LLC has announced that Excelsior JET 4.8, the latest update to the company's certified Java SE technology implementation for desktop and embedded systems, has been released. The key new feature of this version is the substantial reduction of disk footprint of Java applications.

With one terabyte hard drives on the horizon, application disk footprint does not sound like a big issue on the desktop. But the growing popularity of technologies such as U3 Smart Drive or Ceedo Personal, which let you carry your entire computing environment around on a portable device and use it on any Windows PC, forces application developers to think the disk footprint issue over again.

The use of flash memory cards and USB drives as application distribution media is also on the rise, and the less space your app takes, the more data such as maps or ebooks you can put on a card of the same capacity.

Java applications do not quite fit in the above environments. The reason is they only work on systems that have the so called Java Runtime Environment (JRE) installed, and the JRE alone is much larger than a typical desktop application written in C++. The latest versions of the JRE available from Sun Microsystems, the creator of the Java technology, occupy about 70 megabytes of disk space, a bit too much considering flash memory costs.

Excelsior JET converts platform-neutral Java code into highly optimized machine code and produces native executables for Windows or Linux that run without the JRE. Excelsior JET 4.8, released on November 29th, 2006, is the first Java SE technology implementation that enables you to reduce the disk footprint of your Java applications. It detects the components of the Java runtime that are likely not required for your application to work and compresses them using a very effective specialized algorithm. On-demand decompression may be done direct to memory at run time. As a result, a medium-size Java desktop application built using SWT and J2SE 5.0 takes only 20MB of disk space.

Excelsior JET is a certified Java SE technology implementation designed to help accelerate Java applications, secure them against reverse engineering, and distribute Java software products without dependency on the JRE.

The complete list of improvements and new features in Excelsior JET 4.8 may be found at http://www.excelsior-usa.com/jetlatest.html

Excelsior JET 4.8 supports Windows and Linux on Intel x86 and compatible hardware. Three Editions are available: Standard, which lists for $1,200 per developer, Professional, priced from $2,300 per developer, and Enterprise, $4,500. All purchases include one year of support and upgrades.

Academic licenses are available to students and members of the faculty and staff of qualified academic institutions at much reduced prices.