The Real-Time Specification for Java

New languages, programming disciplines, operating systems, and software engineering techniques sometimes hold considerable potential for real-time software developers. A promising area of interest-but one fairly new to the real-time community-is object-oriented programming. Java, for example, draws heavily from object orientation and is highly suitable for extension to real-time and embedded systems. Recognizing this fit between Java and real-time software development, the Real-Time for Java Experts Group (RTJEG) began developing the real-time specification for Java (RTSJ) in March 1999 under the Java Community Process. This article explains RTSJ's features and the thinking behind the specification's design. The goal of the RTJEG, of which the authors are both members, was to provide a platform-a Java execution environment and application program interface (API)-that lets programmers correctly reason about the temporal behavior of executing software.

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