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Geoff is Everyones Own File Format

The J-Consortium http://www.j-consortium.org/ have defined a new Java file format called JEFF.

The goals of JEFF are:

• to be used in resource constrained environments
• combines multiple classes into one file (with runtime linking) > much cleaner than jar files
• much smaller than multiple class files (merged symbolic data !)
• quick to interpret (revised opcodes)

• a security critical flaw
• no standard support for fast class loading
• no systems programing support
• no support for non-java components (jar files could include images etc)
• no support for garbage collection (more critical in constrained systems)
• fails to take advantage of the definition of a new VM to address JavaDeficiencies
• bytecode revision was too minor

GEOFF makes no attempt to define and standard classes or libraries.

I would like the ISO standardisation of JEFF to subsume GEOFF, but my correspondance with the J-Consortium to date is not encouraging.

Failing this, my intention is to release the specification under a license which allows free use and reproduction, except that I reserve the copyright to the specification and the rights to define variants. I would like to minimise variants, however embedded and resource constrained systems are inherently variable. The initial variants will probably be limited to the absence of floating point and/or 64 bit arithmetic.

Systems programming features will always be defined to generate either a security exception (no permission) or to do something appropriate (which, depending on the instruction and the current machine state, could be nothing).

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