A Serially Reusable Java (tm) Virtual Machine Implementation for High Volume, Highly Reliable, Transaction Processing

Transaction processing environments form the backbone of e-business solutions on which much of today's commerce is conducted. The most critical of these environments couple extremely high reliability with performance. Unfortunately, they have done so while retaining a dependency on an aging programming model. Early efforts to introduce Java have been technically successful, but either at the cost of lower performance, or potentially lower reliability. We describe extensions to the Java virtual machine that support the stringent requirements of robust transaction processing environments. The design of a persistent reusable Java virtual machine is presented. Reliability is achieved because each transaction executes in isolation in an apparently unique JVM. Performance is simultaneously achieved through the introduction of new concepts such as the ability to reset the JVM to a clean state, trusted middleware, untrusted application code, and very rapid garbage collection.