I’ve not compared it to Java “5”. In fact the last version of Jet I used was 3.15 which is 2 years old and it consistently outperformed the 1.4 server VM for games programming - utterly beating it at load times and managing parity during execution time.
Cas 
[quote]<— I recommend Jet, it really is as good as they claim. Pro version could be a little cheaper though eh?
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We are running an v3.7 introductory offer by April 15th. Pro license price is 1/3 off, and you can get Windows and Linux versions together at the price of one of them. Upgrade prices are also reduced. If this is cheap enough, go download the eval, but mind that you have less than 20 days left.
[quote]Can you give me some numbers? Say against Java5, how much of an improvement do you see in your apps?
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We are running various benchmarks against the latest version of HotSpot client and server and JRockit right now and will publish them on our Web site soon. We will also publish all scripts, project files and instructions required to run the tests on your system.
If you do not trust vendor benchmarks, why not try it yourself against your own tests or, even better, a real app?
[quote]Cool. You don’t have any plans to offer a free license for open source projects?
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First of all, note that Excelsior is revenue-funded, and providing support costs money. So we have to be careful about giving away stuff if we want to preserve the quality of our support.
We have plans to offer a special license for non-commercial and non-institutional usage, regardless of whether the project is open source. Considering the first paragraph, it will be cheap, but likely not free. But we would surely give it to you for free in exchange for something valuable to us. For instance, you may participate in our beta test program or promote our product on your Web site or elsewhere, etc.
We also have plans for subscriptions and pay-as-you-go licensing, so as to remove the upfront cost barrier on commercial usage patterns such as shareware.
Yes, I fully understand that (I work on a commercial Java product myself). I’m in no position to argue what licensing schemes you should have, but a suggestion would be that you provide a free, case-by-case, no-support license for open source projects. The license could require the projects to explicitly state that the binary was produced with Jet, giving you free publicity for your product. I think both parties could benefit from such a license.
[quote]I’m in no position to argue what licensing schemes you should have, but a suggestion would be that you provide a free, case-by-case, no-support license for open source projects. The license could require the projects to explicitly state that the binary was produced with Jet, giving you free publicity for your product. I think both parties could benefit from such a license.
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This is quite possible. As I said, we do not need money in all cases. Publicity is more important.
We think a bug in our product must be fixed regardless of whether the user who has encountered is a paying customer. So in fact we do provide support to all users, the differences are in priority, responce times, escalation level, etc.