Person:
Ammar,
Mostafa H.
Publication Search Results
Implementing Protocols in Java: The Price of Portability
Person:
Ammar,
Mostafa H.
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As the number and variety of Web- and network-based applications continues
to increase, so does the need for flexible communication protocols and
services to support them. Traditionally, a major impediment to deployment
of new protocols is the need to upgrade millions of end-systems with
compatible implementations. At the same time, Java --- a language
explicitly designed to support development and distribution of new
applications via the Web --- is emerging as a (potentially) ubiquitous
system platform. It is therefore natural to consider whether Java might
speed the introduction of protocols to better support new applications.
In this paper, we investigate the tradeoffs involved in using Java for
protocol implementation and deployment. Using insights from a Java-based
protocol suite and supporting subsystem we have implemented, we describe
the benefits of using the Java language and quantify the performance cost
of implementing a protocol in Java for various combinations of interpretation
and compilation. We find that the performance cost of using Java-based
protocols is presently equivalent to four years of hardware performance gains,
i.e., interpreted, Java-based protocol performance on current hardware is
roughly equivalent to the performance of compiled C code on four-year-old
hardware.