NOVOSIBIRSK, RUSSIA: Excelsior LLC, an authorized Java technology licensee and JVM vendor has announced the general availability of Excelsior JET 6.4, the latest update of its Java SE 6 implementation.

Focused on intellectual property protection, this release introduces the program data encryption feature. Implemented at the JVM level, program data encryption in Excelsior JET 6.4 has no adverse effect on the functioning of reflection and JNI, which is not the case with Java obfuscators, commonly used for the protection of Java applications.

The main distinguishing characteristic of Excelsior JET has always been the ahead-of-time (AOT) compilation of portable Java bytecode down to optimized native code prior to deployment. The side effect of AOT compilation, and one of the product's major selling points, is the greatly increased complexity of reverse engineering and tampering with the application code. However, the data present in the original program, such as string literals and the reflection information, appeared verbatim in the resulting native executable.

Almost unprotected were also application resources, such as images, icons, property files, and the like. Although Excelsior JET enables developers to pack resource files into the executable, locating and extracting them used to be a fairly easy task.

Excelsior JET 6.4 enables Java developers to encrypt program data and resources packed into the executable. Decryption occurs on-demand at application run time. Being implemented at the JVM level, this feature has a minimal performance overhead and, unlike name obfuscation, may be applied safely to the classes accessed via reflection and JNI.

The New features and improvements also includes the Startup Optimizer that reduces the cold startup time of Java applications, improved application performance, faster AOT and JIT compilers, and support for the latest Java SE microversions.

A fully functional, time-limited evaluation copy of Excelsior JET 6.4 is available for download.