Kaffe

Coffee is the clean room implementation of a Java Virtual Machine ( JVM) by Tim Wilkinson, which is published as free software under the GNU General Public License ( GPL).

Coffee is a lean, fast and easily transferable (portable ) virtual machine. Compared with Sun's reference implementation of the JVM coffee is definitely smaller, but at this because of some missing key functions are not quite compatible ( compatible). Coffee can translate for many processor architectures using just- in-time compilation machine language ( compile), without time-consuming bytecode interpretation comparatively fast and economical ( efficient) can be carried out with the running Java programs.

Kaffe supports numerous operating systems and processor platforms, or more precisely, its instruction set architectures, and is therefore described as a cross platform. On many coffee making it the only available virtual machine for a Java runtime environment.

History

The name coffee comes probably from the fact that strong brewed coffee in the U.S. as Java - is called - according to the Java bean. Coffee is the Swedish term for coffee, because the developer Tim Wilkinson began work on the project in Sweden in January 1996. Initially, coffee was developed as part of another project. It became so popular that the developer Tim Wilkinson and Peter Mehlitz built the company Trans Virtual Technologies, Inc. to coffee as their flagship product. In July 1998, published Trans Virtual coffee OpenVM under the GPL. Since then, there will be further developed by a worldwide community of developers. After formation of the GNU Classpath project developments flowed from the previous class library of coffee in GNU Classpath, the coffee now uses himself.