IcedTea 1.4 with XRender support
IcedTea 1.4 got released this week. And while it is full of new exciting stuff, you really should check out the XRender support by Clemens Eisserer. Especially if you often use java through remote X. It just flies! Trying it out is easy as soon as the new IcedTea hits a distro near you:
java -Dsun.java2d.xrender=True my.fancy.gui.HelloWorld
Also check out the JGears2 benchmark to compare your results.
So this speeds up the rendering pipeline to X enormously. Now the next step will be optimizing or rewriting the actual Render backend (pisces at this time) which seems to be the next bottleneck, at least for anti-aliased operations.
Clemens will give a talk about his work at Fosdem. Hope to see you all there.