Compact Java binaries for embedded systems

Embedded systems bring special purpose computing power to consumer electronics devices such as smartcards, CD players and pagers. Java is being aggressively targeted at such systems with initiatives such as the Java 2 Platform, Micro Edition, which introduces certain efficiency optimizations to the Java Virtual Machine. Code size reduction has been identified as an important future goal for ensuring Java's success on embedded systems [20]. However, limited processing power and timing constraints often make traditional compression techniques untenable. An effective solution must meet the conflicting requirements of size reduction and execution performance. We propose modifications to the file format for Java binaries that achieve significant size reduction with little or no performance penalty. Experiments conducted on several large Java class libraries show a typical 25% size reduction for class files and a 50% size reduction for JAR files.