Kaffe
=====

Kaffe (Swedish for coffee) is a virtual machine designed to execute
Java bytecode.  Unlike other virtual machines available, Kaffe is designed
to support multiple platforms with minimal modification by providing a
base level interpreting system.  However, for speed, Kaffe also includes
a "just-in-time" compliation system which translates the bytecode to
native machines code on a method by method basis as the application is
executed.  This has demonstrated speedups of 10 times that of Sun's JDK,
and is general about half the speed of optimised C code.

Kaffe is not a commercial product.  If is completely free and given away
at many FTP sites.  The primary site is ftp://ftp.sarc.city.ac.uk/pub/kaffe.
The Kaffe work is on-going and the machine is continually being developed.
Current information on the Kaffe system can be found on the Web at
http://www.kaffe.org/.

Kaffe is currently supported on six processor archiectures; Intel's
Pentium processors (and similar), Sun's SPARC, the PowerPC, Motorola's
68K, MIPS and Alpha (with the HP and ARM coming soon).  At the time of
writing, the Pentium, Sparc, M68K and Alpha systems supports just-in-time
compilation.  Various operating sytems are supported on the current systems,
including Solaris, Irix, Linux, OSF/1, Window '95 and AmigaOS.

Kaffe and the Jolt Project
==========================

Kaffe forms part of the Jolt project.  This projects aims to develop
the necessary components for a completely free version of the Java system.
This includes the Kaffe virtual machine, the Guavac compiler, and the Kream
class library.  Information on this projects and its components can be
found on the mailing list jolt-list@redhat.com or on the web pages
http://www.redhat.com/linux-info/jolt.
