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Enterprise Java

Performance books put to the test

Tune up your Java programs with the help of these Java books

By John Zukowski, JavaWorld.com, 03/23/01

Many people complain about the performance of their Java programs. Expecting miracles, or just giving in to hype, they want unoptimized programs to perform faster than natively C/C++-compiled code. I don't mean to say that everyone writes poorly written code, but unoptimized code is often less than perfect and can be tweaked to run faster while still being maintainable. In this article, I'll examine six Java books that explore ways to help you improve your Java programs' performance.

The six books are:

• Java Platform Performance: Strategies and Tactics, Steve Wilson and Jeff Kesselman (Addison-Wesley, January 2000)
• Java Performance Tuning, Jack Shirazi (O'Reilly & Associates, September 2000)
• Enterprise Java Performance, Steven Halter and Steven Munroe (Prentice Hall/Sun Microsystems Press, August 2000)
• Java Performance and Scalability, Volume 1: Server-Side Programming Techniques, Dov Bulka (Addison-Wesley, June 2000)
• Java 2 Performance and Idiom Guide, Craig Larman and Rhett Guthrie (Prentice Hall, August 1999)
• Practical Java Programming Language Guide, Peter Haggar (Addison-Wesley, February 2000)

Table 1 provides a quick look at the books' main characteristics. The first two rows should be self-explanatory. The remaining rows describe the books' coverage of improving performance in different Java technology areas.

Table 1: Performance books overview
	Java Platform Performance	Java Performance Tuning	Enterprise Java Performance	Java Performance and Scalability	Java 2 Performance and Idiom Guide	Practical Java
Price	4.95	4.95	9.99	4.95	9.99	2.95
Total Pages	230	430	410	290	300	280
CD-ROM/Source from Web	No / Yes	No / Yes	No / Yes	No / Yes	No / No	No / Yes
Tuning Overview	Good	Very Good	Good	Poor	Average	None
Coding Techniques	Average	Good	Poor	Average	Good	Very Good
Object Loading	Good	Average	None	Average	Average	Average
Data Structures	Good	Very Good	Poor	Average*	Average	Average
Threads	Poor*	Very Good	Poor	Good	Average*	Good
GUIs	Good	Poor	None	None	None	None
I/O	Average	Good	Poor	Average	Average	Average
Distributed Computing	None	Good	Very Good	Very Good	Poor	None
JNI	Good	None	None	Average	None	None
Scale: None, Poor, Average, Good, Very Good A star (*) in a field means the review of the specific book provides further details of the ranking.

Now I'll review each book individually. The order in which I review them is random and not based on their rankings. Beside each book's title is a star rating that is based on the level of coverage and depth of techniques regarding Java performance tuning. One star is a poor rating; the highest rating (five stars) indicates exceptional coverage.

Java Platform Performance: Strategies and Tactics

At only 230 pages -- the smallest of the bunch -- Java Platform Performance tries to pack lots of tips into a small amount of space. It does an excellent job, if your needs match the topics covered. Most readers should have an interest in a majority of the topics.

The book is divided nicely into two parts: one has information on the strategies involved in increasing performance, the other explains the tactics necessary to implement those strategies. Two in-depth appendices describe garbage collection and HotSpot. The garbage-collection chapter focuses mostly on the object life cycle, including a nice description of reference objects; the HotSpot chapter compares optimization techniques that HotSpot uses and the techniques you can use in your code.

 

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