R28 is a major release (as indicated by the careless omissions of "minor" and "revision" numbers. The formal name would be R28.0.0). Our customers expect grand new features and innovation from major releases, and "Ropsten" will not disappoint.

One of the biggest challenges for IT systems is after the fact diagnostics. That is - Once something has gone wrong, the act of trying to figure out why it went wrong. Monitoring a system and keeping track of system health once it is running is considered a hard problem (one that we to some extent help our customers solve already with JRockit Mission Control), but doing it after something occurred is close to impossible. The most common solution is to set up heavy logging (and sacrificing system performance to do the logging) and hope that the problem occurs again. No one really thinks that this is a good solution, but it's the best there is.

Until now.

Inspired by the "Black box" in airplanes, JRockit R28 introduces the Flight Recorder. Flight Recorder can be seen as an extremely detailed log, but one that is always on and that comes without a cost to system performance. With JRockit Flight Recorder the customer will be able to get diagnostics information about what happened _before_ a problem occurred, instead of trying to guess by looking at the fallout.
Keywords that are important to the customer are:
• Extremely detailed, always on, diagnostics information
• No performance overhead
• Powerful tooling to visualize the data recorded.
• Enables diagnostics of bugs and SLA breaches after the fact.

For followers of JRockit, other additions are:
• New JMX agent that allows JRMC to be used through firewalls more easily
• Option to generate HPROF dumps, compatible with tools like Eclipse MAT
• Up to 64 BG compressed references (previously 4)
• View memory allocation on a thread level (as an Mbean and in Mission Control)
• Native memory tracking (Command line and Mbean)
• More robust optimizer.
• Dropping support for Java 1.4.2 and Itanium

If you have any further questions, please email [email protected]. The release can be downloaded from http://www.oracle.com/technology/software/products/jrockit/index.html