Q. What is the difference between Spotless and KVM?

A. Spotless is a research artifact, used as a vehicle for new ideas and technologies developed in Sun Labs.  It runs only on PalmOS.  It is not a product, and comes with no support nor any warranty of correctness, reliability or stability.  We do not even attempt to maintain backwards compatibility from one version to the next.  It should be considered as pre-alpha software.

A version of Spotless was taken by the KJava project and used as the basis for KVM, which is the licensed product available from Sun, ported and supported on many platforms.  The one true JVM for small devices from Sun is KVM.

However, KVM is not standing still. There are still many new areas to be explored in Java for small devices, and this is the role of Spotless. We use Spotless as a vehicle for new ideas. Some of these ideas will work out, and be taken up by KVM, and some will not. We try them out in Spotless, and make the binary publicly available for people outside Sun to try out.  What we learn from that experience we use to help the KVM group decide future directions and to inform further research.  

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26 January 2000