Sun have announced that HotSpot, the adaptive Java VM, is ready for general release. A couple of years ago we were promised a tenfold increase in performance, but things have moved on and JIT technology is generally better now so all we can hope for is 50-100% increase. Still not bad. Sun are pushing it as a server solution and the lowdown appears to be that this is because HotSpot needs at least one pas through a function to profile and optimise it. This is perfect for servers where the same pieces of code are being executed repeatedly, but less so for client side, especially applets. You can download it from Sun's site under a single user licence.