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 MedJava, which is a distributed electronic medical imaging system with stringent networking and computation requirements. Second, we present benchmarks of MedJava image processing and compare the results with the performance of <TT> xv</TT>, which is an equivalent image processing application written in C. Finally, we present performance benchmarks using Java as a transport interface to exchange large medical images over high-speed ATM networks.

For computationally-intensive algorithms like image filtering, Java code that is optimized both manually and with JIT compilers can sometimes compensate for the lack of compile-time optimizations and yield a performance commensurate with equivalently compiled C code. With rigorous compile-time optimizations, however, C compilers still generally generate more efficient code. The advent of highly optimizing Java compilers should make it feasible to use Java for performance-sensitive distributed applications where C and C++ are currently used.