I'm investigating options for speeding up the initial load time of our applets. Looking at the Java Plugin Developer Guide, i see an applet parameter option called cache_archive_ex which references pre-loading.
What's that? I can't find any documentation on what that means exactly anywhere.
And a deeper question, which noone need answer - why doesn't sun's documentation explain what it means?
What is meant by preloading is the following procedure: The library is loaded into a JVM and then its binary memory representation after verifying that everything is ok, the memory region containing it is dumped. This allows faster loading of the library. The JVM can simply map the file contents directly into the memory without loading the classes from the library.
EDIT:
This link might also be interesting: http://java.sun.com/products/plugin/1.3/docs/appletcaching.html
It is a different mechanism than the the one that I described, but perhaps it answers your question.