A method and apparatus for accelerating an object-oriented programming language are provided at a hardware gate level. In a Java-compliant embodiment, a Java Application framework is implemented in hardware. The Java.AWT, Java.NET. and Java.IO application frameworks are supported in the preferred embodiment of the invention. Instances and methods of supported application framework classes that are executed by a Java program are offloaded to a hardware object management system. A software stub is provided as an interface between the hardware object management system and the central processing unit.