The efficient and real-time exploitation of large streaming data sources and stored data poses many questions regarding the underlying platform, including:

1. Performance - how can the potential performance of the platform be exploited effectively by arbitrary applications;
2. Guarantees - how can the platform support guarantees regarding processing streaming data sources and accessing stored data; and
3. Scalability - how can scalable platforms and applications be built.

The fundamental challenge addressed by the project is to enable application development using an industrial strength programming language that enables the necessary performance and performance guarantees required for real-time exploitation of large streaming data sources and stored data.

The project's vision is to create a Java Platform that can support a range of high-performance Intelligent Information Management application domains that seek real-time processing of streaming data, or real-time access to stored data. This will be achieved by developing Java and UML modelling technologies to provide:

• Architectural Patterns - using predefined libraries and annotation technology to extend Java with new directives for exploiting streaming I/O and parallelism on high performance platforms;
• Virtual Machine Extensions - using class libraries to extend the JVM for scalable platforms;
• Java Acceleration - performance optimisation is achieved using Java JIT to Hardware (FPGA), especially to enable real-time processing of fast streaming data;
• Performance Guarantees - will be provided for common application real-time requirements; and
• Modelling - of persistence and real-time within UML / MARTE to enable effective development, code generation and capture of real-time system properties.

The project will use financial and web streaming case studies from industrial partners to provide industrial data and data volumes, and to evaluate the developed technologies.

JUNIPER is partially funded by the European Commission under the 7th Framework Programme for Information and Communications Technologies.

Any opinions expressed on these pages are those of the author / organisation and do not necessarily reflect the views of the European Commission.