Java Is Now Officially Fast
By Adrian Sutton
I don’t use our product outside of debug mode often enough apparently. Having played around with the wiki system I mentioned previously (you do read your planet’s from bottom to top right?), I suddenly noticed that the progress bar our editor applet shows while it’s starting up wasn’t displaying. Turns out the applet was loaded and ready instantly so the screen wasn’t getting a chance to repaint. Awesome! This by the way is only on a 1.4Ghz AMD machine with 512Mb RAM so it’s about the average for corporate desktops these days, maybe a little above and it is running the Java 1.5 beta which provided some massive improvements in start up time. Still, our ActiveX based editor doesn’t load this fast. Even better, I’m using an old version of the applet since I didn’t have a recent copy on my laptop when I came home tonight and couldn’t be bothered downloading a new version. It should be a faster still with the performance improvements we’ve put in.