Hardware acceleration has become prevalent in most application domains as a means to increase performance, while also achieving high energy efficiency. However, the programming models for heterogeneous hardware accelerators inherently support C/C++, thereby hindering the exploitation of heterogeneous resources from managed languages, such as Java. In the University of Manchester, we have been developing TornadoVM; an open-source software technology that can be used as a plugin to OpenJDK and other JVM distributions to enable hardware acceleration in a programmer friendly manner. In this talk, we will present a practical view of TornadoVM and focus on two parts: (i) analyze what can impact the performance of applications on heterogeneous co-processors, and (ii) how Java developers can utilize TornadoVM to increase the performance of their applications.