It’s always a bit of of a tug-of-war when it comes to Java’s write once, run anywhere philosophy (and, what with Java divided into three main streams with many subsections an profiles and the like, it really is more of a philosophy than anything else). Do you go for maximum portability? Do you try to improve performance on some platforms, but not others? But if you take the latter route, why not just write native code?A sort of interesting story from the SD Times on Sun and AMD working together to optimize a JVM for AMD’s Shanghai processor. These quad-core chips are at the heart of Sun’s newest x86 server line; so here, at last, is a concrete way that Sun is using (free) Java to make actual money. Sure, go ahead, build your application out of Java and run it on some generic white box. It’ll work fine. When you’re ready to really ramp up the performance, though, you can always come to Sun to spend some money on servers that will make it work really well. Technology Industry