As experience was gained, Sun published technical guidance for developers such as Thirteen Great Ways to Increase Java Performance (from February 1997), and much more over the following decade.

So far, Java has been adopted mainly for enterprise server-based applications, and many very well-known organizations are heavy users of Java EE (Java Enterprise Edition).

You're probably by now asking whether Java will ever be able to run desktop applications with acceptable performance.

The architecture of certain of the fundamental aspects of the original Java platform meant that by the mid-2000s nothing much further could be done in the way of optimization without a radical new approach.

Well, the people at Sun have been beavering away at it for a number of years, and have reworked some of the underpinnings of the Java platform to overcome (or at least ameliorate) many of the shortcomings mentioned earlier in this article.

On 21 October 2008, Sun Microsystems released their much-anticipated Java Platform Standard Edition 6 Update 10 (Java SE 6u10).

"This customer-focused update features enhancements that improve the usability and performance of the Java Platform on desktop computers worldwide," they say, and "strengthen the foundation for the upcoming JavaFX Desktop."

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