ISO/IEC 20970:2002

Information technology — Programming languages, their environments and system software interfaces — JEFF file format

Publication date:   Jun 27, 2002

Scope

This International Standard can be used with benefits on all kinds of platform.
This International Standard's most immediate interest is for deploying portable applications
on small footprint devices. This International Standard provides dramatic savings of
dynamic memory and execution time without sacrificing any of the flexibility usually attached
to the use of non-pre-linked portable code.
This International Standard is especially important to provide a complete solution to execute
portable programs of which code size is bigger than the available dynamic memory.
This International Standard is also very important when fast reactivity of programs is
important. By avoiding the extra-processing related to loading into dynamic memory and
formatting classes at runtime, this International Standard provides a complete answer to the
problem of class-loading slow-down.
These benefits are particularly interesting for small devices supporting financial applications.
Such applications are often complex and relying on code of significant size, while the
pressure of the market often imposes to these devices to be of a low price and,
consequently, to be very small footprint platforms. In addition, to not impose unacceptable
delays to customers, it is important these applications do not waste time in loading classes
into dynamic memory when they are launched but, on the contrary, to be immediately
actively processing the transaction with no delay. When using smart cards, there are also
some loose real-time constraints that are better handled if it can be granted that no
temporary freezing of processing can occur due to class loading.
This International Standard can also be of great benefit for devices dealing with real-time
applications. In this case, avoiding the delays due to class loading can play an important
role to satisfy real-time constraints.