The distributed real-time specification for Java: an initial proposal

Work is beginning on the Distributed Real-Time Specification for Java, as part of Sun’s Java Co mmunity Process. This paper summarizes some ideas about an initial approach to the specification. The approach is based on providing a natural and minimal mechanistic extension to Remote Method Invocation (RMI) to support the end-to-end timeliness (and other) properties of distributed – in the sense of trans-node – behaviors. These timeliness properties must be preserved for any distributed real-time computing system, regardless of its application programming model – whether RPC, mobile objects, or whatever. The proposed extension also facilitates real-time distributed programming with control flow programming models in particular. A similar facility has proven effective in several other distributed real-time operating system and middleware contexts, and is a primary feature of the unified proposal to OMG for Dynamic Real-Time CORBA.