The Sumatra Project

"Matilda Briggs was not the name of a young woman, Watson," said Holmes in a reminiscent voice. "It was a ship which is associated with the giant rat of Sumatra, a story for which the world is not yet prepared."

Sherlock Holmes, The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire

• The Sumatra Project's goal is to create a research infrastructure for experimenting with mobile code. We have adopted Java bytecode as our basis for transmitting mobile code.

• Toba, a Java bytecode-to-C system.
  
  • A Java bytecode-to-C compiler.
    By generating and compiling ANSI C, Toba avoids interpretation overhead for standalone Java applications.
  • A Java runtime system.
    Exception handling, threads, and garbage collection facilities needed for compiled bytecode.
  • Java API routines.
    All the library routines necessary to run (non-AWT) Java bytecode programs.

• We are not using any source code from Sun Microsystems Inc.
• We currently use the Boehm-Demers-Weiser garbage collector, which is licensed freely.

• Todd Proebsting, Assistant Professor, Sumatra Project Leader
• John Hartman, Assistant Professor
• Gregg Townsend, Staff Scientist
• Peter Bigot, Staff Scientist
• Patrick Bridges, Graduate Student
• Tim Newsham, Graduate Student
• Scott Watterson, Graduate Student

• The Java Hall of Shame contains examples of idiosyncrasies in Java.

• Converting Java class files to C source code:
  • Harissa,
  • j2c,
• Converting class files into machine code:
  • Kaffe

• Sun's Java Headquarters
• Java API Documentation
• Gamelan