The JVM contains many interesting features that are frequently overlooked, not exposed through the Java standard library, or typically only accessible from native code. In this talk we will walk through a few of these features, and how they can be used from plain old java code. For example we will see how to access local variables from calling methods, as well as powerful ways to monitor what the JVM does when executing our code.

Free Java allows us access to these features, as well as the ability to contribute towards improving their implementation and make them publicly available to other users. Together we can influence the direction of Java and help get more powerful features into the standard JDK.