The Maxine VM is a next generation platform that establishes a new standard of productivity in this area of research. It is written entirely in Java, completely compatible with modern Java IDEs and the standard JDK, features a modular architecture that permits alternate implementations of subsystems such as GC and compilation to be plugged in, and is accompanied by a dedicated development tool (the Maxine Inspector) for debugging and visualizing nearly every aspect of the VM's runtime state.
As of the 2.0 release, September 2013, Maxine is no longer an active project at Oracle Labs. We believe that Maxine represents the state of the art in a research VM, and actively encourage community involvement. The Maxine sources, including VM, Inspector, and other supporting tools, are Open Source and are licensed under GPL version 2.0.