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