Java
Carrying on a tradition of building technology in support of current and emerging standards, Atego has a long history in support of the Java language and its deployment in embedded and real-time systems going back to Java’s earliest days.
As early as 1995, Atego’s Chief Technology Officer for Java, Dr. Kelvin Nilsen published an initial description of the design, principles, and theory upon which real-time execution of Java is based. This publication culminated nearly ten years of academic research on real-time garbage collection and the use of high-level programming languages in real-time systems. Dr. Nilsen has been a continual presence and participant in establishment of Java standards ever since. Prior to joining Atego, Kelvin served on the faculty of Iowa State University where he performed seminal research on real-time Java that led to a clean-room Java technology and ultimately to the Aonix Perc family of virtual machine products now deployed in hundreds of thousands of systems.
Atego has participated in a number of Java real-time related community efforts including the J Consortium which hosted the Real-Time Java Working Group, and more recently , the Java Community Process (JCP) in which we are currently active and contributing members, including specification, creation, and review within JSR-282 and JSR-302 expert working groups. The JCP is the mechanism for developing standard technical specifications for Java technology.
Launched in 2005, JSR-282 is an expert working group tasked with refinement to the original JSR-1 that produced the Real-Time Specification for Java (RTSJ). RTSJ was designed to support both hard and soft applications with provisions for periodic and sporadic tasks, support for deadlines and CPU time budgets, and tools to let tasks avoid garbage collection delays.
JSR-302 is an expert working group, formed mid-2006, tasked with specifying a safety-critical Java standard. The initial proposal calls for the features to include a minimal set, with such specific characteristics as static resource allocation and usage, minimal temporal conflicts, and without dynamic loading, leading to the ability to validate implementations using a variety of standards, including DO-178B / ED-12B. And, that the features chosen can be validated using formal models, schedulability analysis, and modified condition/decision coverage (MC/DC) analysis.
Atego has released a variant of Aonix Perc called Aonix Perc Pico that implements the concepts embodied in the emerging JSR-302 standard as an early proof-of-concept vehicle for the industry. Aonix Perc Pico utilizes the notion of subsets and extensions to the RTSJ standard suitable for hard real-time and safety-critical systems, including elimination of garbage collection, provisioning for safe memory management and enabling static analysis. Experience with the Aonix Perc Pico technology is influencing the final design of the JSR-302 specification.
Atego is actively promoting the theories and product implementations yielded from our JCP activities within other standards bodies including The Open Group and the Object Management Group.
Related Links
The following products and product add-ins are available:
The following Java training courses are available:
