The design and performance of MedJava

The Java programming language has gained substantial popularity in the past two years. Java’s networking features, along with the growing number of Web browsers that execute Java applets, facilitate Internet programming. Despite the popularity of Java, however, there are many concerns about its efficiency. In particular, networking and computation performance are key concerns when considering the use of Java to develop performance-sensitive distributed applications. This paper makes three contributions to the study of Java for performance-sensitive distributed applications. First, we describe an architecture using Java and the Web to develop Med-Java, which is a distributed electronic medical imaging system with stringent networking and computation requirements. Second, we present benchmarks of MedJava image processin