ISO 20970:2002

Description

This International Standard can be used with benefits on all kinds of platform.

This International Standard’s most immediate interest is for deploying portable applications

on small footprint devices. This International Standard provides dramatic savings of

dynamic memory and execution time without sacrificing any of the flexibility usually attached

to the use of non-pre-linked portable code.

This International Standard is especially important to provide a complete solution to execute

portable programs of which code size is bigger than the available dynamic memory.

This International Standard is also very important when fast reactivity of programs is

important. By avoiding the extra-processing related to loading into dynamic memory and

formatting classes at runtime, this International Standard provides a complete answer to the

problem of class-loading slow-down.

These benefits are particularly interesting for small devices supporting financial applications.

Such applications are often complex and relying on code of significant size, while the

pressure of the market often imposes to these devices to be of a low price and,

consequently, to be very small footprint platforms. In addition, to not impose unacceptable

delays to customers, it is important these applications do not waste time in loading classes

into dynamic memory when they are launched but, on the contrary, to be immediately

actively processing the transaction with no delay. When using smart cards, there are also

some loose real-time constraints that are better handled if it can be granted that no

temporary freezing of processing can occur due to class loading.

This International Standard can also be of great benefit for devices dealing with real-time

applications. In this case, avoiding the delays due to class loading can play an important

role to satisfy real-time constraints.